Sometimes you see and movie and think: 'It's a shame that it doesn't get the wider audience it deserves...' <br /><br />Well, that's absolutely not the case with this film. I saw it an hour ago and am still wondering why anybody would spend any money or effort making something as vacuous as this. To begin with, the plot is rather flimsy: boyfriend, American, and girlfriend, golden-haired Frenchwoman, are together for two years, start to get bored of their relationship, and thus decide to travel to Italy and visit the girl's parents in Paris. They roam around in the City of Love and meet some weird people, including a couple of former boyfriends of girlfriend. Jealousy, conflict, long dialogs. Oh, and before you start to get excited about dramatic endings: in the end, they cry and decide to stay together despite their difficulties. Life as we all know it, in other words. Let's be honest: even I experienced more exiting things during the last two days, and I am a very boring person, according to some of my friends.<br /><br />Everyday boring events as a movie topic do not necessarily lead to boring movies, at least not when the director manages to present these events in an interesting way. Think of Altman's Short Cuts. Or Lynch's The Straight Story. Unfortunately, the plot of 2 days in Paris as a whole is... well, how could you describe it... unexciting. Things you learned in cinematography 101. The general story is, as I said above, so straightforward that you could forget it exists at all. Plot turns are either trivial or contrived, the characters almost reduced to stereotypes,and although Paris is an exciting city architecturally, the makers systematically selected the blandest of settings. Visual narrative devices (well, mainly the inter-cutting of some photographs) are used in a way that will make you firmly believe that the director tried to make a cheap parody of (good) French cinema of the last five years. Or just copied some of the more inexpensive tricks. The cinematography in general is so basic that you will probably agree with me when I say that your 13 year old niece can make a movie like this with a bit of help from her dad. Actually, even if you don't have a 13 year old niece, she will do a better job.<br /><br />Even this would not make a bad movie if only the actors would set down some decent performances. In 2 days in Paris, however, Julie Delpy (girlfriend), Adam Goldberg (boyfriend) and most of the other actors are prone to overacting and hide their lack of skill or enthusiasm behind a lot of cheap yelling and blustering and gesticulating and contrived facial expressions. To express it concisely, they are all quite bloody awful. And I won't waste any words on the female voice-over that from time to time randomly pops to pretend in vain psychological depth. Think B-grade soft porn.<br /><br />But even with the above all being true, this film could still have been saved. Some movies are so bad that they actually get funny. However, the makers carefully avoided even this and created such a mediocre and bland story, portraying the uninteresting lives of boring characters played by boring actors in such a mediocre fashion that one cannot but wonder whether these people really intended to make a film or were just shooting up some left-over reels because they were desperate to spend all their government subsidies before the Ministry of Culture would reclaim the money.<br /><br />Please do not waste any money on seeing this movie. If you got the tickets for free, you might consider a trip to the cinema, but you could also do something more useful and interesting, like picking your nose or cleaning the toilet...