FILM REVIEW
Paper Heart
It's hard to love this documentary - or is it mockumentary? - about love
Last Updated: Thursday, August 6, 2009 | 4:59 PM ET
By Lee Ferguson, CBC News
Comic actress Charlyne Yi, right, and actor Michael Cera take part in a documentary on the vagaries of love in Paper Heart. (Overture Films) If they can devote entire documentaries to crossword puzzles, marching penguins or the perils of junk food, then certainly there’s room for a film examination of that most complicated and befuddling of subjects: love.
Comic Charlyne Yi and a documentary crew hit the streets in search of answers about the meaning, and attainability, of love.
Enter the indie feature Paper Heart, which opens with real-life comic actress Charlyne Yi standing on a crowded street, accosting innocent bystanders with the loaded question: “Have you ever been in love?”
Yi, by her own admission, has never experienced it — in fact, she’s pretty skeptical about the warm and fuzzy emotion, and isn’t sure she’d be capable of recognizing love if it ever came her way. Paper Heart features early home-movie footage of a young Charlyne humming the wedding march and making her Kermit and Miss Piggy dolls kiss, which hints that a romantic lurks underneath Yi’s ambivalent exterior. Her current friends confirm this suspicion, including Knocked Up co-star Seth Rogen, who reminds Yi her “love glass is half full.”
This sets the rubber-faced, dorky heroine on a quest that will take her from Los Angeles all the way to Paris, with stops in cities as varied as Atlanta, Little Rock, Ark., Armadillo, Texas, Las Vegas and even Brampton, Ont. Working with director Nic Jasenovec, Yi and a documentary crew hit the streets in search of answers about the ineffable, crazy thing called love.
Their findings, at least at first, are wholly earnest and charming. Yi interviews a wide breadth of subjects, including a chemistry professor, a couple who’ve been married for 50 years, a divorce lawyer, and a romance novelist, and she uncovers some interesting, if conflicting, theories about love. The professor thinks it’s all chemistry, while others chalk it up to “magic” and “lightning bolts.” (For one schoolgirl in Atlanta, nothing makes her heart flutter like Applebee’s chicken wings.)
Paper Heart is at its best when interviewees begin to offer up personal anecdotes. Asking real-life couples how they met cute is an idea as old as When Harry Met Sally…, but here, it’s given a clever new treatment. The stories – of a first date on the back of a Harley, or a beau who went to great lengths to save his girlfriend’s Gucci loafers – are re-enacted onscreen by paper puppets, an inventive touch that makes the scenes surprisingly heartfelt and moving.
But somewhere in here — perhaps at the point when the romance novelist stresses the necessity of conflict and “HEA” (Happily Ever After) in every love story — Paper Heart aspires to be more than a documentary. And not even those twee little puppets can save it from its overreaching ambitions.
Yi, second from left, interviews school kids about love in Atlanta. (Overture Films) In the midst of all of the interviews, Yi takes a break from filming to attend a house party, where she meets fellow actor Michael Cera. Cera immediately shows an interest in Yi, a fact that is spelled out when he tells Paper Heart director Nic Jasenovec that he’s “intrigued” by the nerdy young comic.
In short order, Cera and Yi embark on their own tentative romance. Jasenovec encourages this development, convinced that footage of Yi’s first “love” will help bolster the documentary project. This leads to some truly awkward moments for the couple, who can’t even steal a kiss without a camera crew popping up from behind the couch. It also becomes hell for the viewer, who will no longer be thinking about love, but will be trying to figure out how much of what is transpiring between Cera and Yi is real and how much is scripted to achieve maximum ironic hipster effect. (Lending further credence to the idea that this “documentary” is part fiction is the fact that director Nic Jasenovec is "played" by actor Jake Johnson.)
If you look and listen closely, it’s pretty clear that Yi and Cera’s onscreen romance is staged, a fact made all the more obvious every time Cera delivers some very meta commentary on the filming going on around them. A scene where he dryly asks Jasenovec if the documentary will be “quirky” suggests that Paper Heart was intended to be a clever skewering of something — maybe reality TV, celebrity coupledom or our Facebook-obsessed culture, which thrives on living out every moment in front of an audience.
I suspect people in the target demographic for Paper Heart are going to eat this up, but something about inserting Yi and Cera’s jokey, semi-fictional romance into the compelling real-life stories struck me as cynical and more than a little smug. It’s unfortunate, because as they attempt to crack each other up on their first date, Cera and Yi seem like geeky soulmates, and they manage to generate real chemistry throughout the film.
Because both performers are so likable, it’s a bummer Paper Heart doesn’t amount to more. Yi — who co-wrote the film, made the puppets and helped compose the nifty score — manages to inject something almost genuine into this material. She might have a future playing real girls — the bespectacled, messy, tomboyish ones who don’t always get the guy in the final reel. She deserves better than this material, which begins as a sincere exploration of real live beating hearts, then cops out and settles for a fake study of love that, while funny, never feels more than paper thin.
Paper Heart opens Aug. 7.
Lee Ferguson writes about the arts for CBCNews.ca.
