2 DAYS IN PARIS

Watching French actress Julie Delpy’s 2 DAYS IN PARIS makes one almost wish that they were spending two days in Sheol or perhaps in the lowest level in Dante’s Inferno instead. Paris has never looked so ugly, human beings have never acted so ugly, and pornography has never been so ugly. There is a straight line from the Frankfurt School of Marxism (aka The Institute of Social Research and the creator of left-wing political correctness) to this movie. Even so, one would imagine that anybody watching it would be so put off that they would reject all of its values and conclude that Marxism, Communism, and free love are self-destructive, cruel, boring, and pathetic.

Marion and Jack drop in on Marion’s parents in Paris before heading back home to the United States. Jack is a sniveling, self-centered hypochondriac who won’t even help Marion with her baggage up the stairs. He admits several times to lying to her so he can get into her pants. He complains about everything. He is a poor substitute for Woody Allen without any humor.

Jack finds out that Marion is a serial nymphomaniac. She has slept with many men and some of the things he thought were their own private joys, like a picture of him with a balloon around his private parts, are actually part of Marion’s trophy gallery of previous lovers. One previous lover has made an artistic mannequin with her breasts exposed and her legs wide open. Although she is a serial nymphomaniac, Marion rails viciously at men who have dumped her, so much so that she is kicked out of a café. She also weeps uncontrollably that no man wants to stay with her. This is a portrait of the human condition, upon which secular reviewers may wax eloquently. How unjust life is to allow these two intellectuals who just use and abuse everyone, not to find love.

Marion’s fat ugly father likes to shock Jack and everyone else, and he wants to have sex with everyone he meets. Her mother talks about her affair with Jim Morrison of The Doors and her Marxist crusade for abortion rights. Marion’s sister is a child psychologist trying to destroy young children. Her father’s art gallery has the most perverse, ugly sexual paintings, drawings and collages imaginable, including a pig with a gigantic male member, bestiality, orgies, and dismembered body parts.

These intellectuals are so proud of their intellectual achievements that they have fun mocking poor old President Bush and railing against his war in Iraq. It’s interesting to note that the movie almost drives one to go and vote Bush into a third term to get revenge on these horrible people.

It’s interesting that Jack is upset by all of Marion’s affairs. After all, she’s just doing what he wants to do. At one point, he almost hits somebody who wants to share Marion with him, and he talks about how much Americans appreciate private property. Maybe the filmmaker’s point is that he’s just another capitalist American pig, but this piece of dialogue comes across as the most sensible line in the whole movie.