While watching Paper Heart, I found myself wondering what exactly was the advantage of framing the film as a real-life documentary of the real-life characters who happened to be playing themselves in this fictionalized documentary about their real-life relationship (though not really ABOUT their real life relationship since they were in said relationship before the documentary was filmed and thus it is a fictionalized account of their real-life relationship). Did you follow that?

Allow me to explain.

Paper Heart is conceptualized as a “documentary,” following screenwriter/performance artist/musician/occasional actress Charlyne Yi across America as she seeks to find out what true love is by interviewing couples married for 50 years, scientists, children on a playground, workers in Las Vegas wedding chapels, divorce attorneys, and two leather daddies. The resounding pearls of wisdom echoed by nearly everyone she encounters is a maddeningly vague “You’ll know it when you see it,” making the “documentary” portion of the film a shallow effort, little more than curtain dressing for what is ultimately the “real” story of the film.

Charlyne admits to not believing in love and not really understanding what IT is; the idea is that, through the course of filming the documentary, she meets and falls in love with Michael Cera (playing himself as himself), and the “documentary” then comes to be about their budding relationship.

As a postmodernist by training, I can certainly appreciate the self-reflexive film which calls attention to its own construction and piles on multiple and almost indiscernible layers of faux-reality. This kind of multi-tiered play is a hallmark of postmodern filmmaking, and from the French New Wave to Ferris Bueller’s Day Off I always appreciate the attempt (even if the film itself is sloppy from a storytelling standpoint).

What I found so frustrating about the film is that it is never really clear what is real and what is fictionalized. Obviously there is much that is “staged”: cuts to camera angles that wouldn’t have been possible with only one camera; a smoothness of plot development and of conversational flow that wouldn’t have been possible if it were all “raw.” After some light Googling, an audience member might know that Yi and Cera were indeed a real couple and dated for three years, and that the relationship just happened to end in early July (a cynical audience member might wonder if the break up was a publicity ploy for the film). The film was shot in 2009, which means Yi and Cera were already years into their relationship, which means the whole conceit of making a documentary about love which accidentally became a love story about the writer is exactly that: a narrative conceit. The film is no longer a movie about unexpected love, but a movie about a movie about unexpected love—the love story is less the story than the story about the love story.

Officially termed as a semi-documentary, the interviews Charlyne conducts are real but the “character” interaction between herself, her director and friend Jake Johnson (played by actual director and co-writer Nicholas Jasenovec), and Michael Cera (in a role shockingly similar to every character he’s ever played) is scripted. But unless you knew this going in, you would spend most of the film wondering how much of the action happening onscreen is “real,” and how much of it is, well, a lie.

Oh I know, I know, there is no real, the very concept of THE REAL is constrictive, reality is only as reliable or as tangible as it can appear to be so, rendering both nothing and everything real, depending on your perspective…yes, I haven’t forgotten. But the problem with this kind of deceitful play is that it makes the audience feel exactly that way—deceived. In other words, if you want to make a mockumentary, make a mockumentary, and make sure people know that this is what it is. If not, the whole narrative becomes unreliable and the audience becomes suspicious; we no longer trust anything that the camera tells us because everything onscreen is suspect. Our entire focus shifts away from the budding love story and entirely onto whether or not the story is real, and to what extent. Essentially, Paper Heart is the modern-day romcom equivalent of War of the Worlds for an audience savvy and suspicious enough to anticipate such trickery.

Perhaps the conceit would have worked better with a cast of complete unknowns, but due to Michael Cera’s increasingly high profile after the success of Superbad and Juno, the film feels less like a cutesy indie romantic comedy which may or may not also be a documentary and more like fodder for the tabloids.

Furthermore, in their effort to continue to situate the film as being a film about a film, as the love story progresses the film starts to veer away from its constructedness, so even the filmmakers have a difficult time maintaining the film’s multi-layered identity. There are a handful of awkward scenes that intentionally call attention to the cameras that feel just a bit too tacked on—such as when Charlyne and Michael are talking and decide to leave the apartment and then Charlyne turns to the Jake (cue pan shot from a secondary camera to show Jake with his camera) and asks if the cameras should follow. To maintain the film-within-a-film quality, the audience must constantly be aware of the film’s constructed nature, but when the film decides it wants to be a narrative more than a documentary even the director himself has a hard time balancing the two.

Paper Heart was written by Yi and director Jasenovec, both with previous industry experience but neither with experience in a project of this scale. As a first-time feature for both (in all fields of writing, directing, and acting), the film very much feels like one still searching for its identity. As far as first attempts go, the film is funny, and endearing. There is a great deal of potential here for both Yi and Jasenovec for future projects. But as far as first attempts go, Paper Heart is every inch of one, with more artistic ambition than either person quite yet has the finesse to master.

Paper Heart opens this weekend in limited release.  You can catch it at the Birmingham 8 Theatre; check here for showtimes.