All the Vermeers in New York (1990)
Review of All the Vermeers in New York (1990), directed by Jon Jost
Lately, I’ve been on such a kick for nineties movies. Ever since getting my MUBI account it’s been a spiral down into older movies. In college, when I was actually taking film classes, I hated watching anything before 2010.
I purposely excluded myself from the narrative of discussing quote-on-quote older cinema just because I hated how low-quality the camera were back then, or because of how the settings didn’t look as contemporary as what I was used to.
I kind of regret having this mentality, but I forgive myself. I wasn’t raised with culture in my household; my parents didn’t know anything about art or music. The only time we saw movies growing up was when my mother took us to the $3 movie theatre to see a movie that had come out six months ago.
I don’t know what compelled me to watch All the Vermeers in New York. I typically don’t watch movies that have men as an older protagonist, especially when the premise seems like he’s badgering on a much younger woman that’s also probably beautiful.
It makes me think of my years at FIT when so many girls had sugar daddies on my dorm floor. Something about selling yourself to a man for money and respect makes me irked, because in a perfect world women could exist and survive. But still I watched this movie, and boy did I have thoughts. Let’s begin the review.
In New York City, a lonely finance broker meets a beautiful model in an art gallery.
As mentioned before, the main protagonist in this film is Mark, and he’s not as old as I expected him to be. That’s a plus mark right there. Not creepy yet! Anyways, he likes art and one day decides to go to an art gallery to see what’s on display. It’s there he catches glimpse of Anna, a French actress with two roommates with a lot of personality, and he falls in love immediately with her.
I don’t blame him—she’s quite pretty. Mark has an obsession with Vermeer paintings, hence the title of the movie, and the reason why he’s so obsessed with her immediately is because she literally looks like she belongs in a Vermeer painting. Now that, my friends, is typecasting.
We then cut to Anna’s living situation. One of her roommates is an aspiring opera singer who practices all the time in the apartment, and when Anna and her other roommate ask her to stop, she throws a fit and says they’re ganging up on her. Anna then agrees to go on the date, which turns out to be interesting because she brings the rich roommate (not the opera one) with her and she pretends not to speak English for half of the time.
Rich roommate pretends to be her translator, Mark gets confused, and they eventually just laugh off the ruse. Still kind of weird that she basically brought her roommate on a date with her—I know people in NYC have their roommates stalk from a distance to make sure that they’re safe, but this is an entire new level.
Despite this chaos, they continue to date. They don’t seem to love each other, however, which makes this even weirder.
It’s this point in the film where I begin to wonder if this is hybrid/experimental, and I nod along to what’s going on. The acting felt very genuine, like it wasn’t forced at all. It was at this point I began to wonder if the actors were actually going off-script at times because of it. There’s this improv-feel to the way that the acting is done.
It’s still a very cinematic experience. We have some artistic shots and blocking going on, as well as some pretty strange set design (the office of the one art curator is particularly intriguing to me) that feels legit to the story.
I think I emphasized most with Anna, perhaps because she’s a creative trying to make it in NYC. Having come from that background myself, I understand her situation a lot more, although she’s in a completely different country (she’s French).
Someone described this movie as not being like Woody Allen’s Manhattan, and, quite frankly, I agree. I was reminded of the silence in the MoMA, of the people who come alone and just stare the art for hours. Even those who seem like they don’t have a purpose in life can go to an NYC art museum and feel like they belong somewhere for just a couple of hours.
Overall Thoughts
I think it’s an okay movie. It seems quite superficial to me, and I wasn’t too invested in either of the main characters to care. The movie also ends with Mark randomly dying while on a phone call with her and to me that just doesn’t make sense at all.
Like what was the purpose of him going through all of this then? So he could have one single fulfilling relationship before he dies?
But their relationship was very strange, lacking in the romance department all the way through. I think if this film just focused on either one of them and their mental and creativ developments I would’ve liked it a lot more. The current way it is just doesn’t work for me, although it does have its comedic moments and nice shots here and there.
