Tonight I watched Paper Heart, a pseudo-documentary by "performance artist" Charlyne Yi, and guest-starring the neurotically amusing Michael Cera, about Yi's refusal/reluctance to believe in love, featuring interviews she conducts with bikers, people who have been married for 50 years, little black girls on a playground, and even (in a well-intended if slightly obvious attempt to be inclusive) a gay couple. Unfortunately I found this "documentary" (in quotes because about half of it is obviously scripted in an unconvincing attempt to make it seem like a documentary) problematic, to put it mildly. If Monster and Little Miss Sunshine are examples of indie films that make mainstream movies look phony and bland, Paper Heart is an example of another kind: it illustrates why people (usually older, more "establishment" film reviewers) make fun of indie films and the way the genre has become a formula, as genres are wont to do. Paper Heart isn't Juno, or Sunshine Cleaning (neither of which is great - they're just good); it's the equivalent of a 10-page zine badly xeroxed in black and white by a 12 year old (with the only sold copies purchased by her parents and one equally geeky friend).
The main problem, for me, is that I find Charlyne Yi disingenuous and, to put it bluntly, annoying. She makes a documentary about how she's never fallen in love as a sort of reverse-psychology way of finding a guy to fall in love with, and presents herself on film as a boring, apathetic, socially maladjusted "nobody" as a thin veneer to cover the truth, which is that she's a socially maladjusted, apathetic, boring nobody with no personality. Her voice is annoying. Her inability (or unwillingness) to communicate verbally is annoying. Her attempts to be mysterious and enigmatic by never revealing what she's thinking are simply dull. She pulls all the tricks out of the "indie movie" bag, including segments of (very poor quality) animation inserted at several points, breaking down the fourth wall by having her director argue with her on camera, and the seemingly obligatory scene in which she sings a bad indie song (sort of a low-rent version of the already rather low-rent Mouldy Peaches whose music featured so prominently on the Juno soundtrack).
If Charlyne Yi really is a performance artist - and that wasn't just some fiction cooked up to give this turgid film the appearance of verisimilitude - I'd suggest she stick to her day job: the one clip of her doing stand-up comedy is painful. (In the clip where she interviews the little girls on the playground I thought, "She relates to them because she is on the same level they are, intellectually and emotionally.") The concept of "fake documentary" has been done so much better by others - Christopher Guest comes to mind. The interview segments are obviously real, and are the only semi-interesting part of the movie, but Yi is such a piss-poor interviewer, making no attempt to ask interesting questions or follow up answers with intelligent segues, that they too fall mostly flat.
Ultimately I think Yi's roommate/friend interviewed over the phone early on gets nearest to the truth when she punctures this vapid act, saying she thinks Yi does actually believe in love very much and is just putting on a show as a sort of "hard to get" act for people with absolutely no social (let alone romantic) skills. "And I feel sorry for the guy she marries," the friend ads. Well, you might feel sorry for the audience of this documentary as well. Guest appearances by affable funnyguys like Cera and Seth Rogen can't save this one: Paper Heart needs to go to the paper shredder.
Reading this over, I kind of feel bad that I'm being so harsh on a film that is good-natured, gentle, and basically vulnerable. But should I let those guilty feelings get in the way of saying what I really think about a film when I'm reviewing it?
I can see, to some extent, what Yi and her co-writer/director were trying to do with this documentary, but the blunt fact is, they failed.
