Before starring in Paper Heart, comedienne/musician/actress
Charlyne Yi was best known as Jodi, the pot-smoking Asian girl whose
giggly stream-of-consciousness patter stole a couple of scenes from
stoner boys (and accomplished comedians) such as Martin Starr, Jason
Segal, and Seth Rogen in 2007’s Knocked Up. But although it’s
hardly as grating or twee as it looks, Paper Heart definitively
proves that Yi’s charms are best appreciated in small doses.

Paper Heart is part documentary, part scripted romantic
comedy, and part grade school art project (certain stories and memories
are re-created with pipe-cleaner dolls and Michel Gondry-esque
construction-paper sets), but all of the film’s forms are used to
follow Yi’s search for love in the universe.

The sequences where Yi asks mature adults about their heartbreaks
and their romances are quietly effective, particularly when one woman
who’s been married for years claims that “the world looked better”
during the early days of her relationship. But Yi and
director/co-writer Nicholas Jasenovec are more interested in the
dingbat philosophizing of grade school kids, bikers, Elvis
impersonators, Las Vegas wedding-chapel directors, and roadside
psychics, because these freaks’ optimism, combined with their marginal
social status, justifies Yi’s skepticism about true romance more than
the testimonials from ordinary folk. After all, who but a con-artist
psychic who clearly hasn’t a clue about Yi’s life would ever try to
claim that there’s someone out there for her? (Almost as an act of
vengeance, the psychic predicts romantic disaster for Yi.)

Yi’s skepticism is challenged when she meets Michael Cera at a house
party and begins a tentative, sorta sweet relationship with him that’s
filled with such 21st-century bohemian romantic tropes as late-night
instant messaging, discreet kisses, and home-demo Moldy Peaches-type
songs of longing. Supposedly, director Jasenovec (played in the film by
actor Jake Johnson) changes the focus of his film from love in general
to Yi’s budding relationship in particular, but the introduction of
Cera’s “character” is so clearly a fictional contrivance that the
switch feels false. As both Yi and Cera start to resent the
ever-present cameras, Jasenovec and Yi seem on the verge of saying
something here about the impact of science’s “observer effect” on
romantic relationships, but there’s nothing in any scene here as funny
or astute as Albert Brooks’ 1979 reality-TV masterpiece Real
Life.

Paper Heart’s greatest achievement may be the way it shows
the world through the eyes of a type of gal — the awkward,
average-looking tomboy who cannot love — who never gets to star
in movies even though she’s been a fixture of the alternative high
school and liberal-arts college micro-culture for years. As for Cera,
he is loose and funny in his scenes with Yi, but how many more times
can he play the stringbean in love with the quirky girl?