2 Days in New York (2012)

(On TV, April 2020) By the time I realized that 2 Days in New York was the sequel to another film called 2 Days in Paris, it was too late to stop, and I was increasingly sure that I wasn’t in any hurry to watch another film in this series. A comedy of familial humiliation, it stars Julie Delpy and Chris Rock as a Franco-American couple living in New York whose lives are upended when her French family decides to visit. The visitors are skilled in creating trouble and cannot be trusted alone in society, whether because of excessive lust, property crimes or casual racism. The tensions keep rising within the couple, and Delpy the writer-director-star seems determined to create a film of maximum discomfort. Alas, there’s a hard limit to how much of this we’re willing to tolerate, and 2 Days in New York hits it pretty early on. To Delpy’s credit, the actors are fine, the story ends well and this is the film to watch if ever you want to see her fight with Vincent Gallo about her soul. (Fortunately, Rock does especially well as “the American boyfriend.”) One character is so strikingly unpleasant that even the movie is giddy about having him deported from the United States midway through. Still, this doesn’t do much to improve the result: 2 Days in New York is still a grating, deliberately off-putting experience. I didn’t exactly hate it, but I’m not planning on watching it ever again.