Paper Heart Is Beguiling, Enigmatic

One's enjoyment of Paper Heart, a hard-to-pin-down fictional love story wrapped inside a real-life documentary about love, “will hinge almost entirely” on how the viewer feels about writer and star Charlyne Yi, writes Jeannette Catsoulis in the New York Times. Yi and co-star Michael Cera have been linked romantically in real life. Reviews are mixed:

• “Enjoying this wondrous wisp of a something is easy, describing it is hard,” writes Peter Travers in Rolling Stone. “Luckily, Charlyne Yi is an enchantress. I'd follow her anywhere.”

• The film is “sweet, true, and perhaps a little deceptive,” writes Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times, calling it “a very well-made film indeed.” Yi and Cera “ have such enveloping personas that little they do is quite acting.”
• But Catsoulis finds that the actors’ “ extreme lack of sophistication is faintly disturbing,” she notes in the Times. Theirs is “an attachment so tentative and pathologically gawky that it’s almost painful to watch.”