15, 96mins

Julie Delpy is an acquired taste. The kooky cutesy Eurobabe sweetness, the relentlessly analytical emotionalism, the fey Bohemian posturing that made her name in the romantic classics Before Sunrise and Before Sunset can be fatally emetic. And so the news that the 38-year-old gamine has not only directed Two Days in Paris but produced, written, edited, written the music for and starred in it might be slightly terrifying to all but Delpy obsessives. But it’s great.

The film, which plays like a shadow version of Before Sunset, reveals the darker side of Delpy, a wonderfully acrid and bleakly funny persona that her previous collaborators (mostly men) have clearly been keen to suppress. The premise, half Meet the Parents and half Woody Allen, lands a French photographer Marion (Delpy) and her American boyfriend Jack (Adam Goldberg) in Paris for a two-day stopover on their way to New York. Here the neurotic Jack, the butt of many of the film’s fish-out-of-water jokes, must deal with Marion’s libertarian parents (played by Delpy’s real-life parents), bigoted cab drivers and an ever growing procession of Marion’s former boyfriends.

Throughout all this, and despite some stinging one-liners (“Great, the mother’s a slut too,” murmurs Jack during Delpy Sr’s carnal reminiscences) and laugh-out-loud setpieces, it’s the coldness of Delpy’s vision that startles and impresses. She has no desire to make her characters, particularly her own, audience friendly. Her closing monologue, about how we ultimately choose our life partners through apathy and resignation rather than genuine desire, is cruelly bracing, and makes the continuation of Delpy’s Eurobabe persona almost impossible.

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