A few tears shed for the forgone artifice of melodrama Ray Pride Joan Chen's vision of Manhattan splinters gorgeously, a brilliant diamond of romantic decor and shameless swoon.
Movies simplify and exaggerate, or they captivate through mystery and ambiguity.
The doomed lovers swan through a gorgeously concrete city, in a story of striking simplicity. Glass and reflection refract the moods of two unlikely lovers, and New York is shown a place of stone, cut glass and jangled hearts. Manhattan is Chen's visual aphorism for the May-October romance enacted by Richard Gere and Winona Ryder. While the script is studded with telling lines and a believable dance of flirting banter, confessions of need and shortcoming, it is also so simple in its contours as to seem inconsequential to the unromantic eye. That is, most men.