Two Days in Paris

Hallam Foe

This week, two films set in very different cities, but both featuring that metropolis of the heart called love.

Two Days in Paris stars Julie Delpy. She wrote and directed it, too. She also did the musical score. The couple playing her parents (Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet) are her real-life parents. And the cat, Max (Jean Luc)? That’s her cat as well. This might suggest an actor’s vanity project, but it’s a funny and charming antidote to the recent splurge of third-rate romcoms. Superficially, it resembles Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise and After Sunset, which explored the relationship between a French woman (Delpy) and an American guy (Ethan Hawke). They walked the walk, talked the talk, and not much else. But while we have here another French woman, Marion (Delpy again), and her American boyfriend, Jack (Adam Goldberg), in Paris, we’re really in Woody’s World – Woody Allen, that is – rather than Linklater’s. Marion is a mix of Diane Keaton cuteness and Betty Blue craziness. She is an emotional klutz; her bearded Jewish boyfriend, Jack, is a kvetch (trans: complainer). Within the first 10 minutes, he has whined about food poisoning, sinus infections, bad weather, terrorism, French plumbing, Marion’s “swampy” flat and the size of French condoms.

Over in Hallam Foe’s Edinburgh, we have a romance, too, between 17-year-old Hallam (Jamie Bell) and an older woman, Kate (Sophia Myles). At one point, Kate says to him, “I like creepy men” – which is good, because Hallam is a Peeping Tom who is obsessed with his dead mother and lusts after his sexy stepmother (Claire Forlani), who he thinks killed his mother.

Like Jack, Hallam is an outsider. Both observe the world from their own solipsistic solitude, Jack through a camera lens, Hallam through his binoculars. They would rather watch than wade into life.

So, after having sex with his stepmum, Hallam flees his treetop retreat at the family home in the Scottish Highlands for the rooftops of Edinburgh. Here he wanders around like a Peeping Spider-Man, keeping an eye on Kate, a woman he’s fallen for because she reminds him of his mother.

Edinburgh is an accommodating host to the lovesick youth and his pretty prey, but Paris, the great city of romance, pulls Jack and Marion apart. They step into the reality of relationships almost by accident, as if they’d stepped in dog mess on the pavement.

Both films seem fresh and funny because they subvert their respective genres. Delpy’s film appears to be all lightness and fun, but it’s actually a serious look at relationships, and at how difficult it is to get to know someone. Marion and Jack hide behind playful, bickering banter – and never confront what is really going on between them.

You can see why the film hasn’t gone down so well in France: Delpy has taken apart all the self-glorifying guff about the French capital. This Paris is full of racist cab-drivers, and those suave French men we hear so much about turn out to be dirty-minded sex maniacs. And there’s an original, truthful touch when a group of American tourists are put down, not by the French, but by their fellow American, Jack.

Hallam Foe, on the other hand, sounds dark and heavy going, but the director, David McKenzie (Young Adam, Asylum), gives it a gothic-lite tone, and there are a few good laughs thanks to Ewen Bremner and Maurice Roeves, as Hallam’s fellow hotel workers.

Hallam belongs to that line of troubled misfit teenagers that runs from JD Salinger’s Holden Caulfield to Max Fisher in Rush-more. There’s no attempt to hide his utter awfulness or make excuses for it. What sustains our sympathy for him is Bell’s performance. This is his first big role since Billy Elliot, and he’s pulled it off perfectly, managing to be both disturbed and likeable. It’s a showy part, but Bell has the maturity not to show off.

The other great performance this week comes from Sophia Myles, as Kate. She is strong, sexy and more complex than her sweet persona would suggest. The film asks us to believe that a woman like Kate would happily sleep with an immature young man she discovers has been spying on her, and who wants her to dress up in his mother’s clothes – and Myles makes her believable. Maybe she and her creepy toyboy should have tried a couple of days in Paris.

Two Days in Paris 15, 95 mins

Hallam Foe 18, 96 mins

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