The best and funniest Woody Allen movie in a long time was written and directed by a French actress named Julie Delpy.

When I say "Woody Allen" movie, I don't mean the Jewish auteur had anything to do with it, only that the 37-year-old actress seems to have channeled his sense and sensibility in making Two Days in Paris, soon disappearing at a theater near you.

And when I say "best and funniest," that's a relative term. Woody hasn't been at the top of his game since the Carter administration, and Delpy's film is no Annie Hall, or even Hannah and Her Sisters.

It is, however, an entertaining and often uproarious sort-of love story that matches Delpy, doing her best Diane Keaton impression, with Adam Goldberg, playing a neurotic, hypochondriacal, New Yorkerish creative type (get the picture?).

As the film opens, Delpy and Goldberg have been a couple for two years and, after a jaunt to Venice, are stopping in her native Paris for a few days before returning to New York. Goldberg is gently tormented by the Delpy character's ex-hippie parents (played by Delpy's real-life parents, another Woodyish touch) and by the growing realization that his girlfriend has seemingly left ex-lovers in 19 of Paris's 20 arrondissements, and may be working on the 20th.

The movie is Woodyish in one other way: It is wish fulfillment for a certain kind of Jewish guy (I won't mention any names) who likes to think that beautiful French actresses fall hard for, well, a certain kind of Jewish guy. Goldberg probably has a foot or more on Allen, but in his hirsute, dark-eyed way he looks like a cross between a basset hound and everyone's cousin Ira. (But who am I to judge? In real life, Goldberg has been linked with Christina Ricci, among other actresses.) His character is plagued by allergies and migraines, reviles tourists and distrusts the French (admittedly with reason), and is mortally terrified of bathroom mold.

I'm not the first to point out the recent spate of movies that feature Jewish regular guys and the hotties who seem to find them irresistible. Seth Rogen's shlubbiness is so central to Knocked Up that it even figures in the posters. They show a closeup of Rogen's ill-shaven, un-chiseled face and retro Jewfro under the tag line, "What if this guy got you pregnant?" Ben Stiller has made a career out of playing distressed Jewy (as opposed to Jewish) guys who snag lovely un-Jewy (and decidedly un-Jewish) women.

I am not going to repeat the old complaint here about Jewish filmmakers who glorify intermarriage. (Whenever I read of a Jewish actor dating an impossibly beautiful gentile actress, I'm reminded of what Liam Neeson told Diane Sawyer when she asked about his reputation as a Don Juan: "Can you blame me?" [If anyone out there wants to try this response on a significant other, remember that it helps if you say it with an Irish brogue — and happen to be Liam Neeson.]) What make these films intriguing is the way they transform the Jewish male from unlikely leading man to the likeliest leading man of all. Rogen and Goldberg are allowed to become attractive on their own un-Hollywood, non-gentile terms.

Rogen eventually becomes the very guy one might like to have a baby with because he is, essentially, a mensch. His fictive forerunners in this regard are Harry Goldenblatt, the bald, portly divorce lawyer who married Charlotte on Sex and the City, and Donnie Douglas, the hairy, portly divorce lawyer who almost married Daphne on Frasier. In one sense, all three characters play off the cliche that Jewish men make good, caring husbands. But they also demand that you look past their not-ready-for-primetime looks to see the menschy heart beating within.

Goldberg is cast, quite literally, from a different mold. His character in Paris is hardly a mensch, given to mocking his girlfriend in ways that are less gentle than they might seem. And his Elliot Gould head is mounted on a lanky swimmer's body, dappled with tattoos. The movie also goes out of its way to distance the character from Judaism, as when Goldberg's character says that he, like the actor himself, has a Jewish father and a non-Jewish mother. (When another character says he would nonetheless have been deported to the camps, Goldberg mutters, "I always hated camp.")

But he has his charms, and Jew-ish he remains. And at no point does Delpy suggest there is anything odd about a blonde French girl's attraction to this quintessential New Yorker (I'm speaking in code). That's progress, of a sort, and even a moment of rapprochement between the Jews and the French, whose relations have been anything but rosy in recent years.

In an essay about television and intermarriage (I guess I am going to repeat the old complaint), Samuel Freedman once wrote that "intermarriage on a massive scale means the erosion of Jewish community, culture, and identity. All of this ardor for the gentile 'other' cannot help but suggest a sad capacity for Jewish self-loathing."

And yet the flip side is the gentile's ardor for the Jewish "other" — which, you'll have to admit, is a flattering phenomenon, no matter the package it comes in.

Of course, if you overdo it, flattery may get you nowhere.