Documentwee

Charlyne Yi on her semi-fictional, indie-cute
love story Paper Heart

SWEET, EMOTIONAL: Yi

By MALCOLM FRASER

Many may recall Charlyne Yi from a hilarious bit part in Knocked Up as Martin Starr’s stoner girlfriend; she’s also turned up in various YouTube bits evincing a cute, nerdy comic persona. Yi makes her star debut in Paper Heart, a quasi-documentary in which she embarks on a skeptical exploration of the myths of romantic love, while finding herself becoming romantically entangled with none other than Canadian expat and sensitive boy supreme Michael Cera.

Some Cera fans might have found Juno a little too clever, might have thought Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist stepped a little far over the line of twee. These viewers should be warned that Paper Heart makes those films look like The Sorrow and the Pity. The indie-cute knob isn’t just turned up to 11; it’s off the scale. You have been warned.

But if you don’t have an allergy to sweetness, you may get a kick out of Yi and director Nick Jasenovec’s approach; the semi-documentary style keeps viewers guessing as to what’s “reality” and what’s staged. (Unfortunately it’s impossible to talk about the film in any detail without spoilers in that regard, so stop reading here if you’d like to stay blissfully ignorant). Somewhat to my surprise, Yi (who spoke to the Mirror during a media marathon at Just for Laughs), shrugs off the notion that this approach was meant as any kind of conceptual mind-bender.

“It was really just so that my character would have an arc, and since I wouldn’t agree to go on real dates on camera, we’d have to write something out,” she says with a laugh. “We were just trying to nail the tone of reality, so it wouldn’t be so jarring to go from real documentary to narrative. Even to do that, I’d have to tone down who I really was in order for it to come off as real.”

In the film’s “road trip” segments, in which Yi and crew cross the USA collecting romantic stories from longtime couples, their anecdotes are inventively illustrated with primitive puppet plays created by Yi. “We were talking about the look of the documentary portion, and if it was gonna meld well with the style of the narrative,” she recalls. “Nick was like, ‘So what do you wanna do when they’re telling their love story to the camera? What will we cut to, just photos of them when they were younger?’ It was between dramatization, like in those FBI shows, or puppets (laughs), and I pitched puppets.”

From what begins as a starkly cynical perspective (Yi, or her “character,” essentially states that she doesn’t believe in love), the film arrives at a cautiously hopeful stance. “I think, in the beginning, I was more naïve, and scared of the idea of meeting people and falling in love, and the uncertainty of that,” says Yi. “Throughout the whole process of meeting all these people, it was like looking love in the eye, because these were living proofs that love existed. By the end of the journey, I changed how I felt. I think you just accept that everything’s uncertain in life… there’s nothing wrong with questioning love or questioning if it’s real, but you live in the moment and you see where it goes!”

PAPER HEART OPENS THIS
FRIDAY, AUG. 7