Second in the City of Love project that began with PARIS, JE TAIME, the ambition of NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU is to explore the many shades, moods, and delusions of attraction that are peculiar to that metropolis. While some could take place in any city where strangers collide in a haze of desire, and lovers who know each other only too well can, against all odds, discover one another anew, all using deceptions to intriguing effect. There is one, that could take place nowhere else but a place so cosmopolitan, and yet so defined by its boroughs and neighborhoods.
That would be the bittersweet tale of love among the diamond merchants written and directed by Mira Nair. Natalie Portman is the Hassidic diamond buyer who has just shaved her head in preparation for her wedding. Irfan Khan is the Jain diamond seller, whose wife has left him to become a nun, shaving her head in order to become so holy that he must now worship her as a goddess. They bargain hard, but with a flirtatiousness of each knowing that the other is bluffing, and a frank appreciation for the others skill. There is a sudden, startling intimacy, as they meet on more common ground than they imagined they would have, and the lingering memory of that moment is fixed in each heart as they go back to their own lives and traditions with just a twinkle in the eye at the memory. Its the twinkle of pure romantic love that will retain its purity for remaining forever a dream.
In all there are eleven stories, each showcasing one directors vision of amour, more or less tangentially linked, with characters from one sweeping by in another from time to time as they all traverse the streets of New York. Hayden Christensen cons Rachel Bilson into buying him a drink, and finding himself outconned in a nifty way by the womans boyfriend (Andy Garcia). A couple (Orlando Bloom and Christina Ricci) succumb to one another via phone calls that have everything to do with connection, and less to do with the topic at hand. The most metaphysical is by Shekhar Kapur and concerns a woman of a certain age (Julie Christie), who checks into a hotel and bonds with the sweetly innocent crippled bellboy (Shia LeBoeuf), who offers her violets and worship. What is real and what is a dream is less important that finding passion once again, the theme, though treated more earthily, in which Drea De Matteo regrets the one-night stand she had with a handsome stranger as she travels by subway to meet him a second time. What seems like the most pedestrian, literally and figuratively, has Cloris Leachman and Eli Wallach as an elderly married couple bickering endlessly as they retrace their steps to Coney Island for their wedding anniversary, leaving the audience to discover that sweet nothings are only the most obvious form of endearment. Anton Yelchin is duped by his pharmacist (James Caan) on prom night, but the duping is far from disappointing, and a fast-talking writer (Ethan Hawke) is outplayed by a lovely woman who shares a cigarette with him, but saves her identity until it become a trump card. In each there is that sense of a slight heightening the senses, a sense of giddiness for the audience as well as the lovers involved as everyone discovers how each tale unfolds in ways that are rarely obvious and sometimes genuinely, delightfully or tragically surprising. Each is a small gem.
NEW YORK, I LOVE YOU is a heartfelt but never sappy paean to love in many of its definitions, sacred and profane. Disparate stories they may be, but they are as effervescent as champagne, as satisfying as chocolate, as bitter as black coffee, and as wistful as a sigh. To see this film is to understand why it is better to have loved and maybe lost, as the cliché goes, than to have missed out on the messy exhilaration of it all.
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