A group of three women discovers that the solution to their problems lies in a pregnancy test. One woman struggles with an eating disorder, another moonlights as an escort, and another must choose between a passionate affair and a loveless marriage.
The best-laid plans of mice and film writers and directors … well, sometimes those plans never have a chance. “In a New York Minute” is possibly as confusing as its namesake. The characters were stock. What differentiated the three women in the spotlight was little. All were pretty in the same way: young, Asian, long dark hair, parted in the middle, and too much the same at their core, via their cultural thread. Their families were cut much from the same cloth as well. Fathers wanted their daughters pure and at home until their perfect match came along and, in the meantime, working for their family’s good. The women tried, sometimes dismally, to straddle the world of the West in the city that personifies Western culture, New York. Yet they were uniquely bound to the East in ways each found challenging to define.
Unknown to each other, their lives cross paths in an innocuous way. In that meeting, each woman is set on paths that eventually make, break and seal their futures in desperately differing ways. The wrinkle in the time of each woman’s life first brings them together briefly, then flings them back into their everyday lives. But all are changed in meaningful ways by the telltale line on a pregnancy test.
Using a pregnancy test as the lynchpin in the lives of the three young women probably sounded promising on paper or in tossing out ideas for a story. The difficulty in bringing it to life and making each woman unique and different from the others is apparent immediately. First, let’s face it. The writer/director deals by choice with women of a particular cultural and ethnic group. They have the same color eyes and hair. They wear their hair long, straight, and styled in much the same way. Though all speak perfect English, their ethnic accents, at least to Western ears, seem and sound much the same. So switching from the first one to another to further the storyline about each and keep them somewhat synchronized in time is a writer’s and director’s challenge. It becomes challenging to track which character is which as scenes sway from one to another and satellite characters are added. The unfortunate result is slow, controlled confusion. Each character’s story is enough to flesh out a full-length film. Even better, three short films instead of one. I like the idea of the overall stories but didn’t like how those stories played out. I longed for clarity as I watched but unfortunately, it never materialized.
Now available on Digital HD
