Starring: Julie Delpy, Chris Rock, Albert Delpy, Alexia Landeau, Alex Nahon Director: Julie Delpy

    A MANIC comedy of manners, Julie Delpy’s follow-up to “2 Days in Paris” is a mildly amusing, occasionally annoying romp about a French woman whose crazy family comes to visit her for 48 hours in New York City.

    At the center of the morass, Chris Rock tries to anchor the proceedings.

    Delpy reprises her role from Paris as the neurotic, high-strung Annie Hall-inspired Marion, a Frenchwoman who lives with her infant son and new boyfriend Mingus (Chris Rock), who has his own young daughter. Everything is going well in their relationship, Marion tells us in voiceover — that is, until her infantile father, exhibitionist sister, and her sister’s slacker boyfriend, Manu, arrive, sending their domestic bliss into total chaos.

    Much of the humor in “2 Days” relies on tired cultural stereotypes, which might play to broad foreign audiences — consider the recent successes of such culture-class French hits “Intouchables” and “Welcome to the Sticks” — but many of the jokes fall flat.

    The plot is built around several zany sitcom like scenarios, which build to increasingly frenetic screwball comedy. To prevent getting evicted, for instance, Marion pretends to have a brain tumor — a lie that continues to spin out of control. Or Marion’s big gallery opening climaxes with the character selling her soul in a piece of performance art — and then she fights to get it back.

    There’s clearly an attempt to channel early Woody Allen here, combining romantic comedy with surrealist diversions. But while the sequences are over-the-top and the narrative turns unexpected, they don’t follow. What self-respecting New York artist would have a show that combines photographs of their ex-boyfriend with a performance stunt involving the soul? Does it really take three hours to fix a door buzzer?

    These are minor complaints compared with the movie’s bigger problem: Marion and her family’s hysterical antics — which include that of Delpy’s real-life rotund father, Albert Delpy — become less endearing than off-putting. The extremes in which Delpy paints them are just too broad to be believed — devouring their brioche and croissants like a pack of wild animals, or the sister parading around half-naked like some French cliché of libertinism.

    Perhaps French audiences would laugh at themselves in the cracked mirror that is “2 Days in New York,” but the film never stops its onslaught of banter and bickering for its relationships to be considered authentic.

    At the center of the morass, Chris Rock tries to anchor the proceedings. There’s a half-funny bit with Rock confiding in a poster of Barack Obama and a couple of witty exchanges between him and Delpy, particularly at the beginning of the film. But when the movie goes off the rails, there’s little the veteran comic can do to bring it back to its supposed romantic core.

    The film is now being screened in Hong Kong.

    (SD-Agencies)