Julie Delpy charmed her way through “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset” playing a lovely but conflicted young woman. She repeats it in “2 Days in Paris,” her first film as a writer-director.

Delpy sets her project on a fast track as her character, Marion, and her boyfriend, fresh from a vacation in Venice, stop over in Paris on the way home to New York City to pick up her cat. Trouble ensues almost immediately. The aging puss has put on 10 pounds, thanks to a switch in diet from dry food to foie gras.

Initially, one wonders how she has chosen Jack as the probable love of her life. He is a hypochondriac and sees terrorists around every corner, so that makes taking buses or subways out of the question. Day one brings more problems, from her mother, a hippie transformed to ordinary housewife and her father, an artist who specializes in nudes and challenging the boyfriend on celebrated writers.

The pair are not even safe in taxis. They encounter gabby cabbies whose opinions are dispensed, unasked, about wife-beating, childbearing, music and films. Yet the worst is yet to come with the accidental encounter with Marion’s former lover. Jack rebels more and more as the list of lovers expands. At its height, she reveals she is far from the adjusted woman he thought she was.

Delpy goes beyond the closed-in world she and Ethan Hawke inhabited in the pair of “Before” films and comes up with some biting comments. But she goes too far when she introduces a young American who is gay and sets fire to a fast-food restaurant. It seems to come from another film.

As a director, Delpy registers as confident and focused. As a writer, she spawns a film that, besides plumbing the depth of a man-woman relationship, reveals a great deal about the French people’s difference from Americans. As an actress, she retains an elfin piquancy, even though she has reached 35.

Initially, Adam Goldberg seems a man who would be the last choice of a successful woman. He grows, and, by the time her insecurities and lies are shown full-blown, moviegoers may be on his character’s side.

Give credit, too, to Delpy’s father, Albert, whose scene of testing Jack regarding authors is simply hilarious.

Source: syracuse.com