Sex & Relationships

Julie Delpy has a few things on her French mind

Actress, writer, and director Julie Delpy has a few things on her French mind. Take a seat and remain calm. This will be a caffeinated conversation, with no sugar.

This, famously, is where the playboy philosopher Bernard-Henri Levy takes his breakfast. Indeed, everyone who is anyone in Paris comes here. And everyone sitting around me on this bright February morning could have walked out of the pages of a Vogue special issue on grown-up Gallic sexiness. There are tourists taking in the sun on the terrace outside, but inside, here at the very heart of the perennially chic St. Germain district, it’s as if some kind of invisible force field excludes the badly dressed, the fat, and the ugly.

Julie Delpy, 37, rushes in out of the bright winter sun, a few minutes late for our meeting. The astonishingly pale blond hair is unmistakable, though an enormous pair of round sunglasses hides most of her face. She comes straight over, full of breathless apologies, sits down, and takes off a black wool vest. When she removes the glasses, I see that her face is fuller than it was in Before Sunset, more like it was in Before Sunrise nine years earlier, or when she starred in Krzysztof Kieslowski’s masterwork, the Three Colors trilogy.

Delpy’s eyes are the pale blue of the sky on a faded postcard. Her skin is luminous, and her face seems to give off light from some internal source. Her features are perfectly symmetrical. Her beauty stands out even in this crowd of superhumanly chic people, because she’s not wearing makeup and she obviously doesn’t give a damn about fashion. I try to stop myself from staring, but nobody else in the café seems to have even noticed her arrival.

Delpy has been working nonstop for months. “Eighteen-hour days, no weekends,” she says of the long days of postproduction for her movie Two Days in Paris, a comedy she wrote, directed, edited, and starred in, which was a big hit at the Berlin International Film Festival. “Someone said it’s like Annie Hall meets Meet the Parents,” she says, “which is a compliment.” She also recently completed The Hoax, Lasse Hallström’s new movie, in which she plays opposite Richard Gere (it hit theaters April 13).

A sullen waiter comes over, and she orders a full breakfast of boiled eggs with baguette toast, a dish the British call “egg soldiers” and the French call oeufs à la coque. “I don’t know why it’s called that, what à la coque means,” she says, her eyebrows arching. “It doesn’t have anything to do with a man’s c--k.” She laughs. I feel like I’ve been given an allover body shock.

It’s hard to describe the effect of hearing her saying that word moments into our meeting. It doesn’t sound obscene exactly, and I don’t think it’s meant to be flirtatious, but hearing her speak the word so casually is the verbal equivalent of seeing some French babe take off her top on an uptight American beach.

A woman walks by, and Delpy is distracted by a wave of heavy fragrance. The topic shifts immediately. “Frenchwomen wear too much perfume,” she announces. “I never wear ­perfume. Ever. I never wear anything to make me smell better. I never wear deodorant.” She gives another musical laugh at this. “But I never smell bad, you know.” Is it that pale women don’t usually have much scent? “Almost none,” she confirms. She raises her arm and sniffs the bare pale skin on her forearm. “It smells very mild. But I eat very healthy food, I drink a lot of water and a lot of tea. It flushes out a lot of the toxins.”