here<\/a>). I was curious to see what her personal style was, and how much of it she must’ve brought to the table. Now I’m curious to see something directed by Ethan Hawke, if he’s done anything like that.<\/p>\nI didn’t know Adam Goldberg before this film \u2013 or if I did, I’ve never recognized him. I watched the film without a lot of expectations \u2013 I imagined it would be some sort of similar-but-different\u00a0take on Before Sunrise.<\/p>\n
Okay… in summary… I appreciated the film, but I didn’t really like it. I liked the treatment it got, but I didn’t really like the characters. I thought the characters were a little boring, stale, childish, immature \u2013 all of them. 35 year old adults behaving childishly.\u00a0I don’t know a lot about France or French culture, but it seemed like Julie Delpy was either satirizing it for her personal reasons, or delivering stereotypes for some other reason I can’t tell. Do Parisians really talk about sex all the time,\u00a0with people they’ve just met? Seems improbable.<\/p>\n
I couldn’t really respect Marion (Julie) as a character, and thought it was odd or surprising\u00a0that she would choose to write her own character in such a flawed, weak, irrational way. Was it an exaggerated version of her own weaknesses? Or an entirely fictional character altogether?<\/p>\n
I found Adam Goldberg’s character (Jack) annoying too, with his snooty intellectualism and his constant sicknesses. But Julie is probably the worse of the two \u2013 irresponsible, impulsive, and prone to having loud arguments with people. Jack’s not exactly fun to be around either. The most likeable character in the show was probably Jean-Luc, the cat.<\/p>\n
The interesting questions at the heart of the show are\u00a0\u2013 what are the boundaries of a relationship? What is cheating and what is not? Are small lies okay? How much deception is okay in a relationship?\u00a0What sort of relationship should an individual have with their exes, and how do you relate that to your current partner? The movie does a good job of bringing these questions up, but it doesn’t really\u00a0bother trying to explore them in interesting ways \u2013 they’re just\u00a0points of conflict, and they aren’t dealt with.<\/p>\n
Some of the digressions seemed pointless \u2013 a bunch of oddball taxi drivers, Jack meeting a weirdo at a fast food place, running and being mistaken for a thief, some of the interactions between the friends at Marion’s friends, Marion meeting her ex again… all of that, I thought, should’ve been left out to focus on exploring\u00a0the questions I mentioned earlier.<\/p>\n
The film resolves with the characters supposedly having a 4-hour long discussion\u00a0about being honest with one another about their needs and fears, and Julie\u00a0narrating over it. It felt a little rushed and a little too tidy \u2013 I would have preferred that scene to be opened up more and properly dug into.<\/p>\n
I did appreciate seeing a slightly different sort of film, seeing a French family, the arguments, the dynamics, the Parisian setting. But those are all things I can get elsewhere. Ultimately the movie left me feeling a little unfulfilled. I would still consider watching the sequel, because I like Julie anyway and I want to see how she followed up on this one.<\/p>\n
Wouldn’t recommend this film, though.\u00a0Sorry Julie. I can respect that your treatment of modern love is probably different from all the cliche romance-in-Paris films that I haven’t watched, but a film about romantic difficulties should have us rooting for the characters as they fail. Watching Marion and Jack break up had me think “Phew, well, about time. Damn kids. You’re in your goddamn mid-30s. Grow the fuck up, ya’ll.”<\/p>\n
–<\/i><\/p>\n
More movie reviews<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It’s interesting to watch a movie that’s set in 2007 \u2013 social media was just starting to become a thing, but it doesn’t yet feature in the films. My wife and I watched it together in October 2016 on a Saturday night while eating pizza in our living room. I… <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":11639,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[827],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11003","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-movies"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-content\/uploads\/2016\/10\/2-days-in-paris-balloons.jpg?fit=500%2C274&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5gxNz-2Rt","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11003","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11003"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11003\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11639"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11003"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11003"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.visakanv.com\/archives\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11003"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}