Film

Actor Delpy (last seen playing Nina Van Pallandt in The Hoax) demonstrates serious creative chops with this smart, darkly witty comedy, which she not only wrote and directed but also produced, edited and scored.

Delpy and ex-boyfriend Goldberg play Marion and Jack, lovers of several years standing who have just returned from a less-than-successful romantic getaway in Venice. Their itinerary calls for a two-day stay with her parents in Paris before returning home to the U.S.

Jack and Marion’s relationship, already strained, is further tested by his freaked-out reaction to her loud, aggressively bohemian mom and dad (played by Delpy’s actual ’rents, Pillet and Albert Delpy). Then Jack, high-strung at the best of times, begins to feel threatened by the way the flaky, self-absorbed Marion keeps bumping into old boyfriends on every other street corner. Eventually the emotional shit storm that’s been brewing since the first frame breaks, resulting in one of the finest domestic screaming matches ever written for the screen.

The autobiographical dimensions of Delpy’s film have drawn comparisons to Annie Hall, but Delpy is a whole lot braver about putting her thinly fictionalized self in a negative light than Woody Allen ever was. But no matter how ugly things get between the two high-maintenance lovers, it never diminishes our sympathy for them, or our hope that they’ll find a way to make things work.