Chalk it up to one more cultural artifact lost in translation. The 2007 portmanteau film Paris, Je T'aime was a collection of 18 short films intended to function as a movieland map to the City of Lights, each one tracing a different neighborhood via a brief, usually romantic, little tale. The results were uneven, but more often than not, the film succeeded. A couple years later New York's horning in on the idea, with producer Emmanuel Benbihy already planning future editions for Rio de Janeiro, Shanghai, Jerusalem, and Mumbai. If New York, I Love You is any indication, though, Benbihy should probably call it quits before digging himself a deeper hole.

To start with, New York seems a thinner creation, with only 11 directors to stitch the film together. And the producers' collaborative process -- where each director shot his piece in only two days before heading into post-production while the next director got going, and sharing crew like production and costume designers -- seems designed to create a uniformity of look across the entire work. While in theory this might have sounded nice, in practice it makes Allen Hughes' film look like Shunji Iwai's look like Yvan Attal's. This might not have proved a problem, had most of the scripts not been pedestrian as well.

As with the previous film, love is the guiding light here, ranging from doe-eyed romance from afar (Iwai's piece about a sleep-deprived composer, Orlando Bloom, carrying on a phone flirtation with his director's unseen assistant) to the dangerous push-pull of flashfire attraction (in Hughes' film, Drea de Matteo and Bradley Cooper struggle with the after effects of a blazingly intense one-night stand). But though handed a subject with endless possibilities, few of the filmmakers make much of their characters' predicaments. Shekhar Kapur conjures up a few moments of spooky nebulousness with his take on an Upper East Side ghost story by the late Anthony Minghella (featuring Shia LaBeouf as a hunchbacked bellhop). And while Brett Ratner's comic prom-night ode to teen hormones and Central Park isn't much, it at least features James Caan in full grump.

But it's really only Mira Nair's Diamond District fable that fulfills the film's purpose. Natalie Portman (who also wrote and directed a later, lesser segment) plays an Orthodox Jewish woman negotiating a diamond sale with a Jain dealer (Irfan Khan in rare form). Over the course of a few minutes, the densely packed script (courtesy of journalist Suketu Mehta) covers language, dietary restrictions, religion, love; all of it delivered with a narrative punch that the rest of this flabby creation can't even hope to achieve. More representative are pieces like Jiang Wen's story about two men (Andy Garcia and Hayden Christiansen) competing for the hand of a young woman (Rachel Bilson), which might have had potential if not for the fact that Christiansen is possibly the least convincing grifter ever put to celluloid.

Theoretically, each short film is meant to capture a section of the city. The Paris edition didn't make much use of this conceit, and New York does even less. New York concentrates all its stories but one (a token trip to Brighton Beach for a sitcom-style romantic gripe between Eli Wallach and Cloris Leachman) in Manhattan, and even then manages to use a couple of the island's over-filmed regions (Central Park and Chinatown) twice. Granted, it would be asking too much of a film like this not to spend the majority of its time in Manhattan, to do otherwise would have been like demanding the first film to avoid the Seine altogether. But something more than a glancing acknowledgement that a city exists beyond the East River could have injected some hint of real life into this thin and watery concoction.



New York, I love your coffee.