At its best, "2 Days in Paris" takes us off the beaten track and offers an insider's view of the romantic destination, its people and moods and rhythms. It bursts with life, energy and a raw intensity that you rarely see in today's manufactured and marketed movies. This one feels authentic and revelatory in surprising and unsettling ways as it introduces us to a cast of eccentrics and their romantic misadventures.

To be sure, "2 Days in Paris" also veers dangerously close to farcical territory and tends to play into stereotypes of the French as artsy-fartsy folks with way too much time on their hands to indulge their sexual hangups -- but Delpy, who wrote and directed the picture as well as starring in it, always manages to bring the story back to painfully human ground.

The story centers around lovers Jack (Adam Goldberg), a Jewish-American interior designer, and Marion (Delpy), a French photographer. The two have been together, in Marion's words, for "two years of ups and downs and in-betweens." She adds that most of their time together has consisted of in-between periods.

A brief layover in Paris, ostensibly to visit her parents (Albert Delpy as papa and Marie Pillet as maman -- both are also Delpy's real-life parents), turns into a crises in Jack and Marion's relationship when he finds out things about her past, particularly her sexual history with a slew of men, that he can't handle.

Jack and Marion are very much complementary opposites. He entertains more paranoid fantasies and neuroses than Woody Allen. To top it off, Jack has a cynical, bitter streak in him as well. Marion lives for adventure, life and love. She's also an encyclopedia of odd information.

"It's like dating public television," Jack says of Marion's habit of giving lectures on everything from art to the development of allergies in humans.

Behind the camera, Delpy creates a powerful sense of place and space. Much of the picture is shot in what look like real locations -- art galleries, bedrooms, cafes -- and there's a claustrophobic atmosphere surrounding the production. You suspect that if the cinematographer took a step back, he'd bump into a wall.

Delpy's screenplay is less a conventional narrative than a series of encounters. It stays very much in the moment, many of those featuring Marion's ex-boy-friends, who become something of a running joke. A string of cab drivers, one of them outrageously racist, also appear throughout the story. And then there's a wonderful moment when a despondent Jack meets an effeminate male stranger (played by Daniel Bruhl) offering advice at a pivotal turning point.

"I'm a fairy," the man reassures Jack. He means a fairy as in a fairy godmother.

That magical moment aside, "2 Days in Paris" is really about the mundane, universal and yet impossibly difficult act of two human beings trying to connect and make a bigger commitment to each other.