Thanks to the surprise success of producer Emmanuel Benbihy’s Paris, je t’aime, we will now have to endure a series of planned omnibus-film tributes to cities around the world clunked together with submissions from various trendy directors. After Paris, New York is the brow-furrowing first of these. Call them glimpses, snapshots, whatever: the short films in New York I Love You are really just a bunch of undernourished anecdotes that together comprise a tedious tangle of strictly hetero couplings meant to stand in for the contemporary Manhattan experience. That this supposed love letter to New York as a city of chance, romance, and possibility cannot make room for a single same-sex tale in any of its twelve threads reveals its limited vision. Those outside of the Big Apple might take to the shallow urban exoticism this film offers, but real New Yorkers, as well as anyone with a functioning bullshit detector, will shudder. Oh the wide web of interconnections we (or at least some of us) weave. Click here to read the rest of Michael Koresky’s review of New York I Love You.
UPDATE: 10/20! In case you didn’t get enough hate, here’s Justin Stewart on New York, I Love You:
New York, I Love You follows 2006’s Paris, je t’aime as the second entry in a city tribute series created by Emmanuel Benbihy, who is producing along with Crash‘s Marina Grasic. Collective works with multiple directors, the films will next blow kisses to Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Jerusalem, and Mumbai. My humble admonition to Benbihy and Grasic: IT’S NOT TOO LATE TO STOP. A whimsical idea in theory—and a throwback to omnibus films like RoGoPaG (1962) and 1965’s delightful Paris vu par…—the results so far indicate that the project’s already off the rails.
Excepting a painfully dead-on short by Alexander Payne, the Paris film was a mostly wince-inducing collection with particularly ghastly entries from Wes Craven (with Payne as Oscar Wilde’s ghost!?) and Christopher Doyle. It could be dismissed as a one-off curio had it not paved the way for the more thorough disaster that is New York, I Love You, a movie that will test any professed NYC lover’s affection. The producers reject the term “anthology movie” for this project, because there’s actor and crew overlap, and some of the shorts are sliced up and sprinkled throughout intermittently. There were also “rules” for each filmmaker (only two days to shoot, a recognizable neighborhood, a required love encounter of some sort) that fuse the pieces, but the most unifying factor is their badness. Read the rest.
Adorned in oranges, purples, and golds, and unfolding on shimmering soundstages flanked by scrims and screens of varying sizes, Fados creates a universe unto itself, an enclosed festival space meant to stand in for an entire world of song. This is the norm for the brilliant Spanish director Carlos Saura, who for nearly thirty years has built a parallel film career (to his more conventional dramatic one) as a charter of musical traditions. After his “flamenco trilogy,” all collaborations with the late, great dancer and choreographer Antonio Gades, in which he was working through his notions of how to convey dance and movement on screen (Blood Wedding, Carmen, and El amor brujo are all dazzling, self-consciously movie-movie deconstructions as much as filmed flamenco ballets), Saura then moved on to the straightforwardly titled Flamenco and Tango, both immense popular successes. Fados, which takes its title from a tradition of emotive, melancholy singing derived in the poor port-side areas of early nineteenth-century Lisbon (but with African and Brazilian origins), and which has survived into various modern incarnations, rounds out this second trilogy.
Despite its surfeit of predictable narrative cues and cinema-of-quality marks, Swedish filmmaker Jan Troell’s latest work nevertheless paints a persuasive, delicately rendered image of early twentieth-century struggle. His films haven’t been widely seen in the U.S. since the success of his immigrant-experience double feature back in the early Seventies (The Emigrants and The New Land, the former still one of the few foreign-language films to receive a Best Picture Oscar nomination), so, Everlasting Moments, opening in New York and riding a wave of festival praise, is something of an international comeback. Certainly, thanks to moviegoers’ memories of Troell’s golden years and the fact that it’s based on touching true stories of the filmmaker’s wife’s ancestors, Everlasting Moments will undoubtedly have a groundswell of good will surrounding it, despite its occasional imbalance between clear calculation and vivid behavioral portraiture.
The recent Eros and Three…Extremes, occupy the “failed attempt” end of the tripartite omnibus canon, so it’s a pleasant surprise to report that Tokyo!, featuring the talents of fabulists Michel Gondry, Bong Joon-ho, and the too-long-absent Leos Carax proves positive that the logic behind these enterprises isn’t necessarily fallacious—that asking a trio of auteurs to variate around a theme can result in a film bigger than the sum of its individual segments. For all the misconceived episodes from famous auteurs (Soderbergh’s clunker in Eros, the truly abhorrent Park Chan-wook bit in Three…Extremes) and subsequent pitting and ranking of individual parts against each other to the detriment of the whole, sometimes, on rare occasions, the ends do justify the means.
Tokyo!, as you might expect given the exclamation point, is a tribute to the titular metropolis, but given the talent involved, “tribute” should remain loosely defined. The directors are a Korean, a French expat (is Gondry an American filmmaker by this point?), and a French recluse, but even given the group’s penchant for wanly surrealist tones that recall the city’s most famous contemporary literary avatar, Haruki Murakami, their observations about Tokyo’s urban scale, anomie, and the like aren’t exactly headline news. The commentary (save Carax’s grubby terroristic attack on Japanese xenophobia) is expected, but what makes Tokyo! worthwhile is the chance to witness three gifted directors attempting commissioned work and churning out enjoyable, well-crafted films that encapsulate in miniature what made them singular talents in the first place. No small feat.
Beginning with his 1994 debut Before the Rain—a film that, with its interconnecting intercontinental narratives, can be thanked for providing blueprints for all of those Syriana‘s and Babel‘s—Macedonian director Milcho Manchevski has tenuously juggled historical inquiries of his Balkan homeland with a strained, lugubrious lyricism. Ever since his breakthrough his questionable auteur calling cards—gratuitous nudity, restless editing, endless establishing shots of local color—have become ends in of themselves and now far outweigh investigations of national identity and political violence, issues that seemed suspiciously like pretenses in the first place. Now with Shadows, the follow-up to 2001’s ridiculous cowboys-against-the-Turks fairy tale Dust, Manchevski has entered the world of the middlebrow horror movie: no guts and blood or high-concept genre revisions here, just a plodding, obvious ghost story with a featherweight moral lesson attached to lend it a whiff of importance and establish thematic links to the rest of his work. It’s a feeble exercise that only further cements the director’s increasing irrelevance—indeed, readers will likely have already asked, “Milcho who?”
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