NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU
Directed by Jiang Wen, Mira Nair, Shunji Iwai, Yvan Attal, Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Shekhar Kapur, Natalie Portman, Fatih Akin, Joshua Marston & Randy Balsmeyer
Produced by Emmanuel Benbihy & Marina Grasic
Released by Vivendi Entertainment
France/USA. 110 min. Rated R
With Hayden Christensen, Andy Garcia, Rachel Bilson, Natalie Portman, Irrfan Khan, Orlando Bloom, Christina Ricci, Magge Q, Ethan Hawke, Chris Cooper, Robin Wright Penn, Anton Yelchin, James Caan, Olivia Thirbly, Drea de Matteo, Bradley Cooper, Julie Christie, John Hurt, Shia LaBeouf, Taylor Geare, Ugur Yucel, Shu Qi, Eli Wallach, Cloris Leachman & Emilie Ohana 
 

Like a loud, giddy tourist gushing over New York after enjoying a first taste of the city, New York, I Love You comes across as an obnoxious intruder, one that the city’s longtime residents would never elect as its spokesman. It opens with a hyperbolic argument between two young men and an obstinate cab driver and closes with an elderly couple’s prosaic stroll down a Brighton Beach street (the only segment not set in Manhattan, disappointingly). The film—a compilation of 11 shorts by different directors interwoven with transitional sequences helmed by accomplished title sequence director Randy Balsmeyer—fails to capture the energy, absurdity, and diversity of a city that seems so prime a choice for this sort of patchwork film.

Produced by Emmanuel Benbihy (as a follow-up to his similarly conceived Paris, Je T’Aime) with Marina Grasic (Crash), New York, I Love makes more of an effort than its predecessor to hide the seams of the stories from its disparate creators. Characters from one director’s piece reappear briefly in another’s, some stories are split and interrupted. But it’s a rough assembly, in no small part because so few of the stories are that engaging to begin with.

From Chinese actor/director Jiang Wen, we get another awkward performance from Hayden Christensen as a pickpocket on the prowl for the beautiful girl behind the bewitching snapshot he finds in a stolen wallet. Mira Nair (The Namesake) gives us a Hasidic Natalie Portman negotiating diamond rates with a devout Jain. Portman returns, in her writer/director debut, for a quarter-baked story about a “manny” who turns out to be a professional dancer. Brett Ratner serves up a cutesy/kinky fairytale in Central Park with a wheelchair-bound Olivia Thirlby, and Allen Hughes (Menace II Society) lays on the voiceover as Drea De Matteo and Bradley Cooper venture to meet the night after a one-night stand.

In a gritty, romantic story directed by the hugely talented Fatih Akin (The Edge of Heaven), an alcoholic artist asks to paint the portrait of a shy Chinese immigrant working in a nearby shop; of all the stories, it rings the truest. The most pleasant surprise comes in an impressive turn by Shia LaBeouf playing a limping Eastern-European bellhop tending to a nostalgic Julie Christie in Shekhar Kapur’s surreal adaptation of a script by the late, great Anthony Minghella. Who knew the star of Transformers could play a role so distant from his persona so well.

Paris Je T’aime, an uneven, whimsical film of some disappointments and many more pleasures, was also directed primarily by nonnative filmmakers. Perhaps that movie felt as foreign and misrepresentative to Parisians as this one will to many New Yorkers. But storytelling rooted firmly in the language of human emotions often transcends cultural borders and, on that account, New York, I Love You comes up short. Patrick Wood
October 16, 2009