2 days in Paris (15) ***

At the heart of Julie Delpy's romantic comedy dwells two relationships. The first features Marion (Delpy) and her boyfriend Jack, a New York-based couple spending the fag end of their European holiday in Paris. The second exists between Delpy and her home country of France.

It's advisable to don protective gloves before approaching either. For those who prefer their liaisons to have a certain edge, Delpy offers here bouquets wrapped in barbed wire. The contrasts she throws up are amusing, the playfulness is at times delightful, but watch out for those barbs.

As Delpy's introductory voiceover tells us, Marion the photographer and interior designer Jack (Adam Goldberg) have been together for two years of "ups and downs and in-betweens mostly".

On their arrival in Paris, he is grumpy and worn out, a result, only partly, of a recent bout of food poisoning. Jack is a hypochondriac and serial complainer, a man who lives to grump.

Kooky Marion, playing Annie Hall to his Alvy Singer, is the opposite, the glass of champagne to his lukewarm water.

Marion is ready to make the most of her 48 hours, but for Jack these two days are an exercise in survival.

There's little about the French capital and its inhabitants that doesn't leave him yearning for home. He doesn't speak the language, he finds the natives emotionally incontinent and hygienically challenged, and their habit of killing cute animals and eating them is not to his taste, either.

Marion's father and mother (played by Delpy's real-life actor parents Albert Delpy and Marie Pillet) are eccentric and slightly scary.

What Jack finds most disturbing about Paris is its ex factor: the place is littered with Marion's former boyfriends, all, it seems to him, auditioning for a return appearance.

Delpy has fun with Jack's cultural discomfort, though not too much. Being an essentially hip thirtysomething, he is allowed to maintain most of his dignity, unlike the group of American tourists who make an appearance.

In a crass caricature at odds with Delpy's otherwise well-honed script, this band not only wear Bush-Cheney T-shirts but are on a Da Vinci Code clue-spotting tour. One half expects to see them erecting burning crosses in the Bois de Boulogne, such is the level of subtlety Delpy displays.

A fine comedy of manners and misunderstandings ensues as Jack and Marion stumble through through a whirl of dinners, drinks and a visit to Jim Morrison's grave ("I'm a huge Val Kilmer fan," says Jack).

The downturn in their relationship is handled adroitly by Delpy. Neither party does anything openly cruel. What hurts is the realisation that they don't know each other as well as they thought.

The Paris Marion, as opposed to the New York Marion, is a revelation to Jack, sometimes unpleasantly so. She gave this viewer a bit of a turn, too. There's one scene in a restaurant, where Marion meets an old boyfriend again, that is simply horrible to witness.

Like Jack, one longs for the confrontation to end, but Delpy persists in turning the screw.

She shows the same tendency in the taxi-cab scenes that pepper the film.

While the first few cabbies the couple encounter are cheerfully crass, the latter are just grossly offensive.

Two Frances are being shown here; one is a nation of witty, liberal sophisticates, guilty only of a lust for life and love, the other is an old-fashioned, intolerant country full of raging right-wingers.

Delpy presumably intended the ambiguity. As Marion puts it in a statement of the obvious: "It's not easy being in a relationship." She is talking about her character and Jack, but on the evidence of this she could have been referring to her own feelings for France.

Despite the film's breezy start, she plays increasingly rough with her characters and country. Delpy the die-hard romantic, so evident in Before Sunrise and her Oscar-nominated Before Sunset, is still to be found within 2 Days in Paris, but she's grown cooler and more complex.

She's marvellous, and at times spectacularly annoying, in the role of Marion. In Goldberg, she found the perfect foil for the film's farcical tendencies. He keeps the enterprise grounded, as do, in their own oddball ways, Delpy's parents.

There are enough amusing moments amid the angst and yakking to keep matters bubbling along, but far fewer than might be expected from a romantic comedy.

True to form, Delpy keeps us guessing to the end about the fate of her two lovers. If nothing else, they will always have Paris.