5 to 7

Making a romantic comedy in New York without referencing the works of Woody Allen or Neil Simon is a tall order. For decades, television, movies and music have extolled the Big Apple as a place where dreams come true, as a burg of endless amorous possibility. We’re well past the point where stories of young love set in NYC read as cliché, because those stories—from Annie Hall to The Wackness—practically make up an entire genre unto themselves. So perhaps Victor Levin’s 5 to 7 can be forgiven for treating the greatest city in the world in the same way so many other films, studio and indie alike, have done (and will continue to do for as long as Gotham remains a Mecca for cinema).
Mercy should only extend so far, because 5 to 7 is too damn winsome for its own good. Worse than that, it’s disingenuous. Watching Levin’s movie is the equivalent of reading a collection of pre-workshopped, college-level short stories, each scene or bit of dialogue in as desperate need of vision and individual style as the last. Give Levin the benefit of the doubt; maybe his narrative really is rooted in authentic experience and does draw on bits and pieces of real life. But, whether honest or imagined, his narrative never feels anything less than phony. 5 to 7 is low-stakes flirtation that lacks a personal touch.
5 to 7 is about a failed writer, Brian (Anton Yelchin), a 24-year-old denizen of the City who spends his days banging out crummy yarns about baseball and dogs (seriously), and who hangs his burgeoning collection of rejection notices on his wall with misplaced pride. As a character, he’s kind of a cipher: We know literally nothing about Brian for most of the movie beyond what we see in his apartment and what he tells us through his arsenal of bland bromides. The guy has an eye-roll inducing quip for every occasion, except when he meets Arielle (Bérénice Marlohe), a beautiful French woman he finds, by chance, smoking outside The St. Regis and with whom he somehow manages to strike up a relationship.