Let’s face it. The always inconsistent omnibus film is never terribly successful and they’re usually just a chance for a feature filmmaker to take a fun break, perhaps experiment a little and shoot something with much less effort than usual. It’s a lot of talent with little results.
And with so many voices and so many stylistically disparate tones you’re always entered into a worrisome, uneven playing field, filled with select highs and many lows. You’d think with a small time frame, filmmakers might want to try something conceptually exciting or creative, but for whatever reason anthology films generally consist of one random sequence in search of a full-bodied movie with lots of talking heads (“hey, let’s work together actor XYZ, why not!”). Throw a dozen or more scenes into the mix and you’ve generally got a discordant and illogical puzzle that rarely fits well together. The film was shown at TIFF last year in an incomplete form to an apparently disastrous reception , but whatever they did to tweak it, it doesn’t feel any less lacking in inspiration.
And while the producers of “New York, I Love You” — the second in the “Cities of Love” series that will soon attempt editions in Shanghai, Rio de Janeiro and Jerusalem— insist the incongruent and uneven picture is not an anthology film (probably because it has transitions scenes and characters that attempt to blend it all together, plus longer sequences are interspersed throughout to try and create a narrative through line), for all intents and purposes it still very much is one. And really the only complementary elements of the picture are the cloyingly sentimental and faux-magical segments that romantically evince the mood, “oh, isn’t New York such a wonderful town where strangers can meet and exchange a moment in time together?”
Yes, this is where the needle scratches the record player in the cheeseball movie trailer. This idealized cliche is played out and already utilized in every New York-centered romantic comedy, so why would the filmmakers in ‘NYILY’ try and reprise that cheap, counterfeit sentiment (replete with cornball, uplifting score no less)? Meh, who knows, but “New York, I Love You,” is generally of that ilk, unengaging, predictably moonstruck and tediously fanciful. But let’s look at what we’ve got.
The Best Segments
Director: Shekhar Kapur
Location: Upper East Side
The picture was dedicated to the late Anthony Minghella (“The English Patient”), so it’s rather fitting that the segment he wrote, directed by Shekhar Kapur (“Elizabeth,” “Elizabeth: The Golden Age”) on the Upper East Side, is by far the most beautiful, oblique and noteworthy. It stars Julie Christie, Shia LaBeouf (in one of his best performances ever) and John Hurt in a ghostly hotel room where a crippled bellboy (LaBeouf) tries to attend to the needs of an famous ex-chanteuse (Christie). The ambiguous events that transpire behind the veil of a curtain window play with memory fragments, time transposition and fate. The scene evokes the spiritual sides of Kubrick and Kieslowski if led into romantic mood and is an ephemeral love story wrapped up in this expressive tearing of the time fabric. It’s definitely vague which makes it all the more haunting and memorable.
Director: Natalie Portman
Location: Central Park
Simple, yet well crafted and carefully observed, Portman’s surprisingly intriguing short about a single, African American nanny (non-actor Carlos Acosta) or “manny,” taking care of a little white girl (Taylor Geare) in Central Park was full of quiet inquisitive humanity. After he returns the girl to her mother (Jacinda Barrett who was not looking good), the depths of his personality outside this simple station are revealed as a passionate ballet dancer/performance artist. Not mindblowing by any means, but memorably striking and with a bit more contour than most of these facile shorts (random strangers hook up, gee thanks Allen Hughes). Portman also stars in Mira Nair’s short about the intimate experience a Hasidic bride-to-be (Portman) has with an Indian diamond seller (Irrfan Khan from “The Darjeeling Limited” and “Slumdog Millionaire”) and the imagined romance they have on her wedding day, but it wasn’t quite as eventful.
The Worst Segment
Director: Brett Ratner
Location: Central Park
Mark Mothersbaugh, who is falling in our books lately, does the cloying and irritating score (it sort of sounds like the Muppets music) to Brett Ratner’s ham-fisted and on-the-nose approach to a boy’s prom night out with a crippled girl and the streetwise drug-store clerk father that facilitates the last minute night out. It stars Anton Yelchin (the boy), Olivia Thirlby (the wheelchair bound girl in need of a prom date) and James Caan as the dad who tricks the young boy into taking out his “hot” daughter. It’s pretty much entirely directed like that scene in “Home Alone”, when Macaulay Culkin tries to shave in the mirror and screams and it’s neither cute nor funny, but you can certainly picture Ratner’s self-satisfied goofy ear-to-ear grin during the playback of each scene which makes you want to wretch even more.
Fatih Akin’s short about an older Turkish artist obsessed with painting a beautiful, Chinese medicinal store clerk was decent. The fact that Chinese filmmaker Jiang Wen directed Hayden Christensen and Andy Garcia as two pickpockets in love with the same woman (Rachel Bilson) was at least interesting if mostly unsuccessful. Israeli-born French actor/director Yvan Attal’s random-smokers meet cute on the cold and sewer-gas laden Soho streets was one half of an interesting tale. The first, involving Ethan Hawke trying to pick up a girl (Maggie Q) on a street corner who turns out to be a call girl is brimful with the spurious pseudo-poetry Hawke is known for espousing (think the worst, “hey, what if this moment in time…” in a ‘Sunset’ Linklater film that Hawke likely improvised, only dialed up to 11) and generally forgettable. Yet, another sequence from this scene, involving an estranged husband and wife (Chris Cooper and Robin Wright Penn), pretending to be strangers is quite compelling and perhaps illustrates that these pictures — generally shot on the fly and very fast, each director only spent two days directing their scene — are all about fortune and chemistry. For music heads this scene features Radiohead’s “No Surprises” in its conclusion to unspectacular, but OK effect.
Everything else is not worth discussing and the transition sequences — directed by Randy Balsmeyer featuring Eva Ammuri, Justin Bartha, Emile Ohana, plus a few previous actors we’ve run into — are guilty of and fraught with all the fraudulent and mawkish sentimentality about the Big Apple.
The most rancid part of the picture is the conclusion that uses the video artist (the rather annoying Ohana) and her art show as a cheap excuse to montage-collect all the dreamy, wonderful scenes you’ve just seen in one last role-call sequence that’s projected on a New York rooftop, replete with the glorious skyline peering out in the distance. You cannot help but roll your eyes and wonder: do filmmakers just see New York as just one vapid expression of cliche, city-of-lights intoxication and aren’t there deeper and more fulfilling stories to tell? [C-]