The delicate state of foreign relations

“2 Days in Paris” is pure Julie Delpy, figuratively and otherwise. Since first becoming known to American audiences in the early ‘90s, she’s revealed herself to be an artist of sundry and unexpected talents, with a distinctive voice and point of view.

Most of these are on display in her first feature-length movie, which she wrote, directed, produced, edited, scored and stars in, opposite Adam Goldberg. She cast her real-life parents, Marie Pillet and Albert Delpy, as her parents in the movie. Finally, for what one can only assume is good measure, she sings the song that plays over the end credits, accompanied by the slinky French pop band Nouvelle Vague. If one were to learn that Delpy manned the craft services table between takes, it would come as no great surprise.

The movie opens with a shot of Delpy traveling on a French train next to an American guy. What else is new? Like “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset,” which she co-wrote with director Richard Linklater, the movie is a transcontinental love story. Unlike them, it’s a transcontinental love story in which the relationship has progressed well beyond the hypothetical and into the quasi-hysterical. Not surprisingly, there’s a glimmer of Celine (from the Linklater films) in Delpy’s new character of Marion, though Marion is dreamier and more volatile than Celine, less cerebral and fractious. She’s also considerably less French. A longtime resident of the U.S., Marion is suspended in that nebulous in-between state where all expats eventually reside. Delpy subtly captures this floaty nowhere feeling as Marion drifts between her old and current lives and Jack (Goldberg) completely loses his bearings.

Marion is a free-spirited and somewhat diffuse photographer whose congenitally damaged retinas impair her vision so that she can see objects only peripherally. Her boyfriend, Jack, on the other hand, is a high-strung American interior designer whose view of the world is as rigid and doctrinaire as his taste. After a disastrous Italian vacation -- the food disagreed with Jack, and he insisted on snapping pictures of every instant of the trip -- the couple spend an even more calamitous couple of days with Marion’s family, friends and, to Jack’s growing horror, ex-lovers. At least three of them, all of them French.

At first blush, “2 Days in Paris” looks like it’s going to be the story of a culture-clashing couple. But slowly and rather slyly, Delpy zeros in on something much more subtle and complex. What interests her are not the superficial differences between people from different countries -- your skinned rabbit is my tourist in a Bush/Cheney T-shirt, and so forth -- but the way in which the distances between people, genders and cultures (the very distances we rely on to grant us the perspective needed to see how completely insane other people, genders, cultures really are) seem to shift constantly according to circumstances.

One moment, Jack is categorically rejecting all modes of European public transport (in case of terrorist attack), and the next he is recoiling from his compatriots because they have bad taste in books. Likewise, Marion chafes at Jack’s American provincialism one moment, and can’t believe how xenophobic Parisian taxi drivers are the next. No sooner has either one of them settled on a single, hidebound world-view than a situation arises to smack them out of it.

The more Jack -- who doesn’t speak a word of French -- interacts with Marion’s family, the more entrenched he becomes in abstract absolutes. “I’m an American,” he tells one of Marion’s exes. “What’s mine is mine!” And yet, not long before this he found himself fending off Marion’s father Jeannot’s insinuation that all Americans are ignorant of French and even American literature. Jack may be covered in tattoos, but when Marion’s former hippie mother (her first words of dialogue are “Can’t those poor exploited nurses go on strike? This isn’t America!”) lets him in on a little secret about her sexual past, he’s instantly transformed into a prig and a prude.

Naturally, the worm eventually turns, and Marion is left furious and sputtering after a chance encounter with an ex-lover who used his “immersion in Thai culture” (he worked for a foreign aid organization) as an excuse to do some very bad things. Is the German eco-activist (Daniel Brühl, seeming like he just walked off the set of anti-globalist caper “The Edukators”) that Jack meets at a fast-food chain an Earth-saving “fairy,” as he claims, or is he a terrorist? Delpy’s wry, acerbic sense of humor and privileged perspective make her the ultimate outsider-insider, perfectly positioned to ask the most astute questions.

Eventually, a kind of synthesis arises from the battle of the perspectives -- that is, that there are no absolute ideas and no fixed identities. One man’s freedom, as we know, is another man’s French.

carina.chocano@latimes.com

MPAA rating: R for sexual content, some nudity and language. Running time: 1 hour, 36 minutes. In limited release.