A New York Story: Tender, Undercooked But Charming Look At Big Apple’s Upper Crust

Imagine a beau monde so freed of day-to-day travails that it looks like a Jane Austen yarn woven into a Henry James social critique.

The literary references are perhaps out of place here. We are talking about a film that zooms in on New York’s elite and then doesn’t know what to do with these self important insulated people with a steep sense of self-worth unsupported by anything that they have achieved in life.

For a brief while as the film’s sultry New York night opens its arms to its ennui-driven characters, I was not sure which era the narrative is impaled to, until I saw someone whisk a mobile phone out . The characters seem frozen in time, and not in a good way. They are ‘timeless’ people with a lot of time on their hand.

Also, it is to be noted that all the characters are young, trying hard to not look and sound callow. Director Fiona Robert casts herself in the lead as Annabel Fleming. It is never advisable to have the director casting oneself in a film in an important role. More likely than not, there is bound to be a stench of self-indulgence in the double functioning.

Annabel is supposed to be beautiful, artless, seductive, waif-like and irresistible. Sorry, but Ms Robert doesn’t tick most of these boxes. She is at best adequate, though that too is not the order of the day. Paul Karmiryan, playing the talented but non-elite photographer Theo Offit, who gleans Anabel out of her cushiony cocoon, is meant to be an early Brad Pitt. More like a poor man’s version of Hugh Grant.

The film wears the blushing orange-glow look of a ripening evening. The only true hero of this trying-hard-to-be-clever-about-characters-trying-hard to-be-clever film is the cinematography by Senda Bonnet .

Every frame is a wondrous creation. I wish the people inhabiting those sumptuous frames showed even an iota of the appeal which they seem to have inherited without deserving to do so. I tried to empathize with these glib inhabitants of an insulted world. But it was a losing battle. This is a New York best left to its own devices.