Paper Heart

Looking for love, but it’s a shell game

August 07, 2009|Ty Burr, Globe Staff

In the arch make-believe documentary “Paper Heart,’’ actress-comedian Charlyne Yi crisscrosses the country interviewing average Americans about love. These sequences are ostensibly real, but Yi’s director, Nicholas Jasenovec, is played in front of the camera by actor Jake M. Johnson, and the scenes documenting Yi’s growing romance with actor Michael Cera, playing himself, are patently staged. The movie’s a platypus: cute as the dickens but what the heck is it?

The hook is that Yi doesn’t believe in love, or says she doesn’t - who knows what’s really part of the act? She’s a drolly funny figure, though, a young woman with the thick glasses and asocial slouch of a stereotyped Asian-American nerdgrrl but the antic rebel grin of a gremlin. You saw Yi in a small role as the stoner girlfriend in “Knocked Up’’ and we see snippets of her stage act here; in one bit, she tells the audience she’s wearing a wig, then teases them for being so gullible, then teases them further by removing a wig that looks exactly like her own hair.

That about sums up the movie, a shell game of reality and put-on. The interview segments are pleasant enough, if not exactly groundbreaking. Yi quizzes college science professors on the chemistry of infatuation, talks to a romance novelist, visits an Elvis wedding chapel in Vegas, gets scammed by a psychic. “Paper Heart’’ provides a sideways glimpse of the industry that feeds off our endless love of love; a tougher documentarian might want to come back here someday for an extended dig.

Yi’s travels to the heartland are similarly calorie-free and charming. In listening to a couple married 50 years, a divorced man, a pair of high school sweethearts, a gay couple, and so on, we learn that, well, love’s a mystery but you know it when you feel it. The sweetest parts of these sequences are the tatty marionette shows Yi fashions out of the interviewees’ back stories - true-romance puppet theater. She created them with the help of her dad, Luciano Yi, and the little we see of her parents’ relationship makes the viewer wish for more. But perhaps that would hit too close to home.

Yi’s romance with Cera is pussyfooted around in similarly opaque ways. The actor drifts into view as part of the larger funny-young-Hollywood circle surrounding Yi, then turns up on the set, at which point the director (or the actor playing him) decides the growing relationship should be filmed as much as possible. This causes dramatic conflict, or it would if the conflict didn’t seem so hopelessly cooked up. Yi and Cera are adorable together but in no way are we getting the truth of what they feel for each other (or what may have led to their recent breakup).

In a way, that’s the point: Whatever love may be, you’ll never capture it on film. Still, the stylistic games reflect Yi and her generation’s larger dilemma. “Paper Heart’’ is a movie that can’t commit about people who don’t know how to.

Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to www.boston.com/movienation.