French actress-writer-director Julie Delpy ("Before Sunrise")'s latest is called " 2 Days in Paris", an American film despite the fact that nearly all of its cast is French and the story is set in Paris. (It is also mostly in English, although the film occasionally does use subtitles.) While I have seen Ms. Delpy every once in a while, I had never seen one of her films from start to finish, and certainly not one in which she stars and directs, as well as writes the script.

This is one of those comedies about relationships and romantic misunderstandings. However, the comedy in it is largely extremely subtle, and very, very cutting. The funniest laugh-out-loud moment comes when we realize that Ms. Delpy's character has downloaded a photo of her current boyfriend, Jack (Adam Goldberg) to her parents' computer - however, it is not your ordinary photo - Jack is nude and has balloons tied to his private parts.

Most of the rest of the movie isn't nearly that uproarious, and isn't meant to be. Marion and Jack, whose last names are never revealed, are a thirty-something couple trying to rekindle their relationship on a European vacation. He is American, she is French. He is a compulsive photo-taker, yet it is typical of this film's sensibility that even though this presents plenty of opportunities to show off some beautiful European scenery, director Delpy never does. (We don't even get a glimpse of the Eiffel Tower.) No, this movie is interested in showing us the twists and turns of Jack and Marion's relationship.

The two end up spending, as the title says, two days in Paris, where they take up temporary lodgings at the home of Marion's parents, an eccentric and sometimes insufferable couple played by Julie Delpy's real-life parents, Marie Pillet and Albert Delpy, both excellent actors. Marion's father has some definite quirks, among them scratching the outside of parked cars at random with his car keys.

They are not the only eccentrics, however. Jack is so neurotic that he makes Woody Allen seem like a normal person, and his constant whining to Marion makes one wonder why she doesn't split up with him merely on the basis of his complaining. However, some of it may be justified - Jack and Marion keep running into several of her ex-boyfriends, and Jack soon begins to suspect that Marion is not the monogamous person he imagined her to be. Marion, on the other hand, is not above picking a fight in public with a total stranger over his racist beliefs, or making a scene when she encounters an old boyfriend who may or may not be a child abuser. And Jack has an unfortunate habit of meeting up with weirdos and getting himself into sticky situations from which he barely escapes.

What I am describing sounds like a very lively and interesting film, but in the end, it really isn't. After all the fighting, misunderstandings, and making up, we feel more like saying "So what?", since nothing really illuminating has been said about their relationship - Jack and Marion learn, after nearly two hours, to accept each other as they are, after all.

There are other dissatisfying things about this film, and one of them is the style of photography. I don't know if this was Ms. Delpy's decision or that of the cinematographer Ludomir Bakchev, but since Ms. Delpy directed the film, I must assume that this was her decision. Marion and Jack's conversations are filmed with hand-held cameras, and rather than showing them in a two-shot (that is, the two actors in the same frame), the camera pans abruptly from one face to another as they talk, in a sort of very exaggerated pan-and-scan. This is not the fault of the projectionist - the picture is obviously made that way, and while it may have been meant to convey discomfort, it merely becomes annoying.

"2 Days in Paris" boasts fine performances, and certainly gets points for originality, but it is not the sort of film that I would recommend unless you are specifically in the mood for it. There are several films out there which are probably far more worthwhile.