New York, I Love You
Directed by Various Directors
Runtime: 110 min.
WORSE THAN A remake, New York, I Love You is a dreadful imitation of the terrific 2007 film Paris, Je t’aime, where over a dozen directors shot short-stories in Paris. More than a billet doux to the city itself, the shorts also conveyed distinctive aspects of international human experience. Each short was inspired, most of them were superbly executed and memorably performed—Juliette Binoche’s Isabel Coixet segment and Margo Martindale in Alexander Payne’s segment remain as vivid as the best recent feature-length films (and Wes Craven’s entry was easily the best filmmaking of his career).
Not only does this Big Apple rip-off lack directors of comparable stature (it’s made by such third-raters as Fatih Akin, Allen Hughes,Yvan Attal and Joshua Marston), but the shorts themselves are visually offensive (color seems to bleed out of images) and contain halting dramatic content. Starting with Bradley Cooper in a taxicab tug of war between hateful Manhattanites, the attempt to romanticize New York grittiness fails repeatedly.
Hayden Christensen and Andy Garcia as pickpockets competing for the same women is a dismal attempt at charm. Natalie Portman and Irrfan Khan as Hasidic and Hindu diamond merchants haggling on 46th Street can’t contrive enough ardor to overcome the prevailing ethnic obnoxiousness.
Rock bottom might by Cloris Leachman and Eli Wallach as a couple of excessively cute Coney Island alter kockers. Or is it the suicide allegory performed by Julie Christie as a depressed opera singer who pities a crippled bellboy (Shia LaBeouf) in a creepily dark, empty hotel run by John Hurt? Between Christie’s crumbling elegance and LaBeouf’s deformity, you overdose on drab. Better that this story, conceived by the late Anthony Minghella, had never been filmed. It’s a summary of New York, I Love You’s unexportable ideas.
