New York, I Love You (2008)

New York, I Love You arrives as the second installment of the Cities of Love franchise, a portmanteau of eleven shorts stitched together with skyline montages and a wandering videographer who drifts through the other stories. The ensemble is deep and genuinely varied: Irrfan Khan, Maggie Q, Shu Qi and Julie Christie share the screen with Ethan Hawke, Andy Garcia, Cloris Leachman, and Eli Wallach. Two segments were directed by women, Natalie Portman and Scarlett Johansson, though Johansson's contribution was cut before release after a focus group registered its displeasure. The result is a city portrait that treats its cross-cultural pairings as ordinary texture, not as a statement.

Which is the film's quiet virtue. It casts a wide net and says almost nothing about it. Critically, the multicultural emphasis earned praise as one of the film's chief assets, and the interracial romances pass without a single line of commentary about race itself. There is no LGBTQ thread anywhere in the eleven segments, no environmental conscience, no indictment of the Diamond District or the Upper East Side, and no interest in the body or the mind as a subject for instruction. That leaves charm, lightly applied.

The critics were divided, as they tend to be with anthologies, and the box office was modest at under ten million worldwide. Roger Ebert observed that such a film cannot add up, only accumulate. He was correct. The vignettes want to flirt, not to argue, and at no point does the film mistake itself for a civic lesson. For a survey of this decade, that restraint reads as quaint. The film offers romance, a handsome city, and no instructions for living. We score accordingly, with the mildness it deserves.