New York, I Love You
Starring: Bradley Cooper, Natalie Portman, Irrfan Khan, Maggie Q, Shu Qi Directors: Mira Nair, Allen Hughes and nine other directors Category: IIB
New York, I Love You should have been renamed Manhattan, I Love You, as all but one of the short films in this anthology take place in the island's picture-postcard settings, as protagonists roam Central Park, fall in love in a Chinatown shop and reflect about love and sex in (and outside) SoHo and Greenwich Village eateries. The film only ventures beyond the Big Apple's core during a segment set on Brighton Beach - and even then, it's centred on the Coney Island amusement park, an area that shares more of a mythical aura with Manhattan's neighbourhoods than it does with Brooklyn's earthier suburban areas.
This over-reliance on New York's much filmed and more well known charms imposes a uniform vacuous sweetness on New York, I Love You. There are certainly aesthetic differences in how filmmakers tell their stories. Brett Ratner's brash teenage sexual fantasy, for example, is quite different from the poetic melancholy permeating Shekhar Kapur's contribution about the lament of an aged opera singer in an elegiac Upper East Side hotel. But this omnibus hardly offers the variety of emotions of its French predecessor, Paris, Je T'Aime.
That is not to say that New York, I Love You doesn't deliver its share of mesmerising morsels. Mira Nair's segment about a Jain diamond dealer (Irrfan Khan) and his client, a Hasidic Jewish bride-to-be (Natalie Portman), begins as a funny, frenetic intercultural exchange but ends as a spiritual treatise about two lonely souls trapped within their own cultural confines.
On the other end of the emotional spectrum, Allen Hughes contributes an electric piece about a man (Bradley Cooper) and a woman (Drea de Matteo, right) heading for their first proper meeting after a one-night-stand. Their troubled mental states are conveyed remarkably through a quick-fire collage of their carnal encounter and their long journey across town and into the night.
Beyond such unconventional gems, however, the film is weighed down by an array of lighter, quirky romances. Shunji Iwai's entry, about a disgruntled film score composer (Orlando Bloom) and the mysterious helper who guides him on the work on the phone, oozes sweetness but not enough of the spike that usually comes with the Japanese filmmaker's work.