A scattered snapshot of an urban giant

A rare connection: Julie Christie plays a former diva who connects with a bellhop — played by Shia LeBeouf — in an Upper East Side hotel in one of the highlights of the muddled and inconsistent “New York, I Love You.” (Courtesy photo)

“New York, I Love You” is presented as the second installment in a series of story collections that depict love in a designated city. It follows “Paris, je t’aime,” which had some novelty appeal and a fair number of gems in its overall patchwork, and it plays like a pale sequel.

The film features work by 11 directors and their chosen screenwriters and actors. The directors were instructed to shoot for two days, depict a romantic encounter, and feature at least one identifiable New York City neighborhood. The results have been combined into a romantic travelogue that, visually, takes us nicely around the city’s multicultural map while proving less satisfyingly variegated tonally and dramatically.

Two pickpockets (Hayden Christensen, Andy Garcia) try to out-pilfer each other while also competing over a woman (Rachel Bilson) in the lead-off story, which transpires in Chinatown and is directed by Jiang Wen.

A diamond-district episode, directed by Mira Nair, follows. A Hasidic Jew (Natalie Portman) and an Indian Jain (Irrfan Khan) share an unexpected closeness.

Additional stories include Joshua Marston’s Brighton Beach vignette featuring an elderly couple (Cloris Leachman and Eli Wallach) and Yvan Attal’s two scenarios involving a man, a woman, a come-on and a twist (with Ethan Hawke, Maggie Q, Robin Wright Penn and Chris Cooper).

Basically, this is a serving of Big Apple sauce that contains enough cute and amusing moments to remain watchable but has too few winners in its story mix to be able to achieve pleaser status.

Quality-wise, the stories range from embarrassing (Brett Ratner’s Central Park sequence involving a teen’s prom date with a girl in a wheelchair) to sparkling (Fatih Akin’s Chinatown piece about an artist and the young herbalist whose face inspires him) to, far too often, so-so. Unlike its “Paris” predecessor, in which a short film by the Coen brothers was Coenesque fun, among other joys, this movie seems largely a producer’s project that has been put together with a focus on likeability and smoothness that dilutes its appeal as a filmmaker showcase.

Additionally, the characters are a mostly white, heterosexual lot with movie-star looks — hardly a full picture of the city to which the movie presents itself as a valentine.

Standouts among the cast include Julie Christie. Playing a former diva who connects with a bellhop (Shia LeBeouf) in an Upper East Side hotel, she highlights a splendidly lit but dramatically blurry sequence directed by Shekhar Kapur.

IF YOU GO

New York, I Love You

Two and a half stars

Starring Natalie Portman, Irrfan Khan, Ethan Hawke, Robin Wright Penn and Julie Christie

Written by Hu Hong, Meng Yao, Suketu Mehta, Shunji Iwai, Olivier Lecot, Yvan Attal, Jeff Nathanson, Xan Cassavetes, Stephen Winter, Anthony Minghella, Natalie Portman, Fatih Akin, Joshua Marston, Hall Powell, Israel Horovitz and James Strouse

Directed by Mira Nair, Jiang Wen, Shunji Iwai, Yvan Attal, Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, Shekhar Kapur, Natalie Portman, Fatih Akin, Joshua Marston and Randy Balsmeyer

Rated R 

Running time: 1 hour 53 minutes