The relationship between France and the US, worldly aunt and brash godson of western civilisation’s happy family, is nowhere better illustrated than in Julie Delpy’s romantic comedy Two Days in Paris. Actually, better to forget that unhelpful label. There is comedy, but not a great deal of romance in the noxious Parisian air as Delpy and her co-star Adam Goldberg gradually tear each other to pieces in the course of an emotionally fraught weekend.

The French-American couple can easily be read as metaphors for their respective native lands. Delpy is spontaneous, owlishly beautiful, casual with her eroticism and volatile in her politics. Goldberg is uptight and upright, puritanical and proper, at the same time defensive and patronising. He cannot bear her emotional briskness; she cannot abide his sentimental moralising, preferring to bask in the sullied waters of sexual cynicism: “I want to be your friend when we break up. Whenever we break up. If we break up.” It’s a telling descent into unwilled qualification. He thinks it’s forever; she is passing the time.