Like 2009’s Paris Je T’aime, New York, I Love You compiles the work of several writers and directors. It’s essentially a series of short films, glued together as a continuous whole. Although main characters from some stories do recur as marginal characters in others, and it’s all tied up at the end with a montage, the only real thematic link between the segments is that they’re New York love stories.
In one, a thief steals a woman’s phone so that he can return it to her and chat her up. In another, a married couple pretend to be stangers in order to spice up their sex lives. In another, a boy takes his boss’s wheelchair-bound daughter out to the prom, sleeps with her, and then finds out that she was only pretending to be disabled. In another, Shia LaBeouf unconvincingly plays a depressed Russian bellhop. And so on.
Probably everyone could do with a bit of romance in their lives, and sometimes watching an unashamedly, cheesily sentimental film can be pleasurable and even cathartic if you fully give yourself over to it. But this is not one of those films. It’s an abominable series of unearned emotional climaxes. It’s about a thoroughly dislikeable assortment of privileged, sullen, self-absorbed, narcissistic people and their tedious relationship woes.
Shamelessly plundering such amiably freewheeling indies as Night On Earth (1991) and Before Sunset (1995) for ideas, New York, I Love You treats its characters’ ditchwater-dull conversations as if it’s the first time we’ve ever seen them unfolding onscreen. In one particularly irksome sequence, Ethan Hawke attempts to chat up Maggie Q by explaining to her how intimate “sharing a flame” to light a cigarette is. Wow. Like, deep, man.
The cinematography and writing are as smug and bland as an IBM advert. You could say that the film is remarkably consistent in terms of tone, considering how many different directors contributed their various segments. Or you could say that it’s uniformly boring; each director is as anonymous as the last.
Overall Verdict: ‘New York, I Love You / But you’re bringing me down…’
Special Features:
Trailer
Reviewer: Tom René