‘PAPER Heart” is like a really special five-minute YouTube clip that goes on for an hour and a half.
This (I am really tired of typing the following two words) fake documentary follows the winsome comic and actress Charlyne Yi as she goes on a quest to discover the true meaning of love. (The hook is that she supposedly doesn’t believe in love.) To this end, she interviews real, representative Americans, such as biker dudes and Vegas wedding chapel proprietors, around the country.
Interspersed with these (I think) actual interviews are phony, scripted scenes in which she meets the passively amusing actor Michael Cera (playing himself), and the two start dating. When he says, “Funny? Romantic? Quirky? Quirky comedy?” he pretty much gives away the game: This movie is an improv rom-com. Everybody wants to riff, and nobody wants to risk writing an actual joke.
After a while the two actors pretend to get tired of the cameras following them around. How meta of them! This crazy story line is off the hook! You do the math!
I remain in awe of the iron determination of documentarians, like those lonely guys on the beach with $500 metal detectors who are willing to spend 45 hours to come up with $1.79 in spare change. In this case, 300 hours of shooting yielded enough bits and pieces to fill up the running time, if not quite to the brim. Included are scenes in which Yi and Cera go to the zoo to watch lions and monkeys (nothing happens) and to the grocery store to shop for dinner (they can’t decide what to buy).
Some of the real couples share warm stories about their courtship, “When Harry Met Sally”-style. Although many of these are lovely to hear, Yi and her co-writer and director, Nick Jasenovec (who in the film is played by actor Jake Johnson), lean heavily on kitsch backgrounds to ramp up the irony value.
Everyone who talks to them does so amid the stuffed heads of antlered critters or anatomically correct mannequins, or in an Elvis outfit, or from the bench of a divorce court. About the only people Yi meets she doesn’t need to frame with kitsch are some kids at an Atlanta playground who are funny enough on their own.
If Yi doesn’t score many laughs, Jasenovec is wise to keep the camera glued to her face. Her various smiles (shy, earnest, goofy, nervous, psychotically fixed) are so adorable that they augur a solid career in quirk.
You may even like the absurdly amateurish puppet sequences (the Yi-made dolls look like paper clips with cardboard pasted to them and faces scrawled on) used to re-enact some of the courtship tales. I liked them, too, until about the fourth go-round, when I began to have the sense that I was watching the Creativity Day project of the most talented kid in fifth grade.
PAPER HEART Developmentally arrested. Running time: 89 minutes. Rated PG-13 (profanity). At the Lincoln Square, the Empire, the Angelika.