LITTLE ROCK — New York, I Love You is the second installment (after 2006’s Paris, j’taime) in a proposed series of portmanteau films about big cities and little serendipitous romances. Producer Emmanuel Benbihy eventually means to reproduce the experiment in Shanghai and Rio de Janeiro (among other cities).
It’s an interesting gimmick, and how well it holds your attention may depend on your degree of occupation with the titular city (which in this case, isn’t really the whole of New York, but mainly the semi-private island of Manhattan), and your tolerance for skittish cinematic briefs. There are 11 stories from 11 directors braided together here, each shot over the course of two days in what must have been a kind of gleeful 48-Hour Film Festival mania.
Movie
New York, I Love You
A collective work of 11 short films shot by renowned international directors including Jiang Wen, Mira Nair, Brett Ratner and Natalie Portman, in each of the Big Apple’s five boroughs, with a common interwoven theme of finding love. With Bradley Cooper, Andy Garcia, Hayden Christensen, Rachel Bilson, Portman.
Some are better than others, but nearly all of them have the slightly formal feel of a classroom assignment and most of the directors color between the lines - Brett Ratner’s bawdy prom night joke being the notable exception. (In context, Ratner’s contribution, which stars Anton Yelchin as a recently dumped high school kid and the always welcome Olivia Thirlby as his last-minute date, is - like a Charles Addams New Yorker cartoon - either refreshingly unpretentious or simply tasteless.)
Aside from some lovely imagery - most notably Julie Christie - and a surprisingly uniform, oversaturated look that renders the city in warm vanilla light, there’s not much memorable about this mild, sweet movie. If you do love New York, it’s pleasant enough. If you don’t, fuhgeddaboudit.
MovieStyle, Pages 36 on 11/20/2009