Review of Autumn in New York, directed by Joan Chen

If you’re new here, and stumbled upon this blog through the mythical powers of the Internet, welcome! I know a lot of visitors to my website are people who randomly come upon this website through search engines like Google, but I also do have a lot of visitors who come back. Regardless: my name is Ashley, and I started this blog in order to keep track of everything I’m watching.

For three years I worked professionally as a film critic, and while going to all of the film festivals and interviewing directors and actors was cool for a while, but I wanted to reclaim my time and watch movies I wanted to watch. Sometimes watching all of the new releases is great, and behind ahead of the curve, but I feel like I was falling so behind on movies I was genuinely excited about.

So I quit and decided to focus on this blog. I also randomly fell into a period of unemployment because of unexpected circumstances, and I took a long and hard look at my finances and realized I had enough to take time off. I did end up doing that, traveled for a bit, applied to jobs, and found myself working on the blog now more than ever.

I recently (at the time of typing this—I imagine the blog post is coming out much later due to the sheer amount of backlog I have lately) acquired a Criterion subscription for the first time in a while. I tend to go on and off with my subscriptions because they can get quite expensive in the end.

While Gilda, which I posted a review of the other day, is the first movie that I watched while on this subscription, I then watched Autumn in New York. Something I love to do when it comes to film and literature is to find movies/books set in New York City. As someone who went to college there, I had a blast studying its history, so there are bonus points if these are historical novels or movies set during a certain time.

I had never heard of this movie before I watched it, but it was in the Winona Ryder collection at the time. I love the curated Criterion collections, and I think they usually have some hidden gems. This movie was a little difficult to get through though, and we’ll get to why soon.

Let’s start the review! I know introductions can get quite long.

A restaurant owner falls in love with a younger girl who has cancer.

As expected, this movie takes place in New York, and the character we follow the most is Will Keane. He owns restaurants and is quite successful with his life and career, and he’s got a string of women coming his way whenever he wants. He’s quite the ladies man and a flirt, but one day, when he’s working at one of his restaurants, a young woman in a group catches his eye.

Her name is Charlotte, she’s 22, and she’s with her grandmother, who knows Will. They’re at the restaurant to celebrate her birthday, but we quickly learn that Charlotte is the daughter of Will’s ex Katy, who passed away when she was a newborn due to a car accident.

Will doesn’t forget Charlotte, and he calls her the very next day and requests her to make him a hat. She does that, but when she comes to drop it off at his house, he asks her to come with a benefit dinner with him. He claims that he’s been stood up by his actual date, but this is the beginning of their romance together.

After the dinner they officially become an item, but Charlotte has big news to drop: she has a terminal illness. It’s a heart condition and it seems like there’s no way she’s going to live long, which is tragically sad considering she’s only 22 and already has such a vibrant life.

Another day passes and they go on a walk together through Central Park. Charlotte grabs his watch and says she’ll give it back when he forgets about it, and when they make a meal for staff at the restaurant, he falls even morew in love with her. But that same night, she starts having incredible chest pains, and he has to take her to the hospital.

Charlotte now has a tumor near her heart and is going to die within a year. Will tries to distance himself somewhat and gets back together with an old fling at a party, has sex with her, and Charlotte senses something is wrong. She ends things with him, and Will goes back this old ways.

He does find out that he has an illegitimate daughter and tries to meet her at her workplace. He doesn’t go up to her, but later on she shows up at his apartment to chat. Turns out she’s pregnant and is thinking about parenthood, and she’s been having dreams about a father who says he’s sorry for what he’s done. Will apologizes when she admits this.

Charlotte then finds him the next day in her bedroom. She kicks him out while he begs for another chance, and she ends up crying in his arms. Not long after, they’re skating in Rockefeller Center when she collapses and finds out she only has a few more weeks of life left. Will begins looking for someone who can help her, and his daughter tries to help him out.

She finds a guy who agrees to work on Charlotte, and all seems well for now. But on Christmas, she collapses while getting ready to give Will his gift, and he takes her to the hospital. All her loved ones gather outside the room, and a few hours later, the doctor emerges. She didn’t make it.

Will goes home and opens her gift: it was a box that contained his watch. He starts crying, then we cut to the next summer. He’s holding his grandson, just born, while on a boat in Central Park. He sees a swan, then a mirror image of a woman walking over the bridge in the water by him.

Overall Thoughts

While I think this could’ve been a cute movie, I found it hindered by something incredibly hard to overlook: the main relationship. The two of them have an age gap, and while it is a legal one (she’s 22 and he’s in his late forties, the vibe these two just gave off was kind of weird to me. It didn’t help that she was his ex-girlfriend’s daughter.

That made it even weirder, especially when we have the familial cycles and his grandson coming to his life in the end. Like the gap between her and his grandson is about the same as the one between him and her. And I just can’t get over the fact she was his ex’s daughter. That’s so bizarre.

If these aspects weren’t here, I might’ve liked this movie more. It comes across as a 2000s movie in that way, and through some of its montages, but all in all I didn’t find the movie to be up my alley.

Taste is subjective, so I imagine someone out there to love this movie. Neither of us are wrong, and that’s fine. Go watch it if you’re interested. If not, maybe skip it.

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