Review of Paper Heart (2009) by Benjamin F — 11 Feb 2010

This is what you get when a film stars two people with minimal charisma and screen presence - one of whom has built his career on finding humor in just that - and plop them down into a "documentary"/mockumentary of sorts. The film's kind of a muddled mess, overall. I couldn't honestly call it bad, but I couldn't honestly call it particularly good, either.

The central concept is fairly contrived. Despite their lack of presence or charisma, it's hard to dislike the two leads. At the same time, their entire relationship in the film is trite and clumsy - like much of the rest of the film. This works on a humorous level given the narrative's constant self-awareness in the scripted segments with the lead couple, the camera following them everywhere though still hardly presenting them as a believable, real couple. (Though in the past, at least, they actually were in real life.).

With that being as messy as it is, we have the interviews to look at. Most of them are similarly clumsy and don't really say much, if anything. The greatest insight on love in there is probably that when you try to get people to think about and articulate love in any meaningful sense, they try to wax poetic and sound about as deep as a Hallmark card. As a love-cynic myself, just listening to the interviewees' responses to Yi's questions only convinced me more that a lot of people don't actually have much in the way of passionate, meaningful bonds with their partners. That their relationships are just as mundane as the rest of their lives, but they are what they are - humans are unspectacular creatures by nature, so of course in reality something we romanticize as much as love doesn't really live up to reality.

This sort of divide is just what Yi seemed to want to tackle, except she doesn't really come off as sincere when she insists she doesn't believe in love, either. It's a pretty transparent defensive mechanism in her case, and nothing more.

The original music was pretty decent - in particular some of the quiet acoustic guitar tracks in the background. The cinematography really varied from segment to segment, and the direction was a little rough, the film dragging and wandering aimlessly at times, but it's functional enough that you can watch it comfortably enough in its short running time. And the cardboard cutout animation segments were a neat addition, even if they were little more than a visual quirk to attract the hipster crowd.

On the whole, Paper Heart is an interesting experiment, but it doesn't really know what it wants to be. As a documentary, it falters. As a scripted mockumentary, it falters. There isn't much direction under the surface, the entire structure meandering by nature, and while the self-awareness added to what made it interesting and at times humorous, this doesn't sustain. I can't bring myself to hate the film, and some people have obviously gotten more out of it, but I'd just have to say that your mileage may vary with this one - and that I'd have to personally say that you can skip it without missing much. In the end, all it can find to say about love is that it involves taking risks. That's it.