New York, I Love You

Watching New York, I Love You feels like walking through Manhattan catching brief flashes of affection: there’s charm, but also a stab of frustration. The film is an anthology of eleven short stories directed by filmmakers such as Mira Nair, Joshua Marston, Yvan Attal, Natalie Portman, and Shekhar Kapur — all trying to capture the soul of the city through love, yet failing to construct a unified narrative. The result is a collection of beautiful fragments that don’t quite talk to each other.

The film’s strongest segment is undoubtedly Joshua Marston’s piece starring Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman walking through Coney Island. It's simple, honest, laced with humor and melancholy. She nags him for walking too slowly, and in that moment, a whole lifetime of shared love and companionship is revealed. It's a slice of truth, without flourishes or pretension, offering more emotional impact in six minutes than many full-length segments in the film.

At the opposite end of the spectrum lies Brett Ratner’s segment, which comes off as cartoonish and insensitive. The twist — a woman pretending to be paralyzed who suddenly swings from a tree branch — is both gratuitous and jarring. It undermines the film’s fragile romantic tone and feels like a cheap trick, more offensive than clever.

The production rules imposed on the filmmakers — shoot in two days, deliver eight minutes — give the film a rushed, uneven feel. As a conceptual experiment, it’s admirable, but the result is inconsistent: some stories shine, while others collapse under the weight of superficiality or artificial twists. Attempts to create continuity, like a videographer linking the segments, serve more as visual bridges than narrative threads.

The acting varies wildly. Julie Christie and Shia LaBeouf in Shekhar Kapur’s segment (from a posthumous script by Anthony Minghella) bring a poetic, nearly tragic air to their encounter, one of the film’s most delicate and atmospheric moments. Natalie Portman directs her own short about a Hasidic bride and her Rastafarian diamond cutter — played by Irrfan Khan — and while it’s sensitive and restrained, it still succumbs to thematic predictability: "love versus tradition."

The film wants to paint New York as plural, multicultural, glamorous and raw at the same time. But this duality often fails to translate with authenticity. In many moments, the city feels more like a generic backdrop than an organic presence that shapes the stories. Looking back, Paris, je t’aime had more cohesion; here, the concept outpaces the storytelling.

Still, there is some value in this imperfect mosaic. Isolated moments manage to create memorable scenes that capture the city’s spirit. There’s Wallach and Leachman’s couple, Attal’s playful seduction scene with Ethan Hawke, the multicultural casts that reflect a romantically skewed yet still real image of New York as a city of immigrants.

In the end, New York, I Love You is neither a traditional love story nor a truly iconic homage to the city. It’s a collection of shorts that sometimes move, sometimes annoy, and rarely convince as a whole. From a critic’s perspective, it’s a noble ambition, poorly executed. It lacks rhythm, depth, and connection between the fragments. But when it works, it does so sincerely — and in those moments, we catch a glimpse of the city’s real heartbeat, the upside-down, always-awake heart of New York. For lovers of collective cinema, it’s an intriguing experiment; for those seeking a fluid emotional journey, it may fall short.

New York, I Love You (2009 / France, USA)
Direction: various directors — Jiang Wen, Mira Nair, Shunji Iwai, Yvan Attal, Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Shekhar Kapur, Natalie Portman, Fatih Akın, Joshua Marston, Randall Balsmeyer
Screenplay: Israel Horovitz, Hall Powell, James Strouse, Suketu Mehta, Shunji Iwai, Anthony Minghella, Xavier Cassavetes
Cast: Natalie Portman, Shia LaBeouf, Bradley Cooper, Ethan Hawke, Andy García, Orlando Bloom, Christina Ricci, Julie Christie, Anton Yelchin, James Caan, Cloris Leachman, Eli Wallach, Chris Cooper, Robin Wright Penn, Irrfan Khan, Blake Lively
Running Time: 103 min.