Monthly Archives: August 2009

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PAPER HEART

C

Part documentary, part fictional romcom, and all twee, “Paper Heart” is a little movie that will delight some people but turn others off with its extravagant quirkiness. By turns oddly amusing and infuriatingly smug, it’s bound to become a cult item of sorts, but it’s likely the cult will be small.

The thrust of the picture is documentary footage showing Charlyne Yi, known for a stand-up routine in which she appears in big glasses and messy clothes as a sweetly uber-nerdy oddball (and for a brief part in “Knocked Up”), going cross-country to interview ordinary folk about love. (The key is that she’s doubtful about the possibility of real love herself.) But even this part of the film is questionably “non-fiction” as most of the interviewees have been pre-selected and the fellow playing director Nicholas Jasenovec is actually an actor (Jake M. Johnson), blurring the line between reality and fiction even more. The ambiguity is further increased by the device of using hand-made puppets to act out some of the stories the interview subjects relate—a cute way of lessening the “talking head” syndrome so common in documentaries, but hardly one that encourages faith in the content.

And that truth-vs.-falsehood line is definitely crossed in the second major part of the picture, an entirely made-up romance between Yi and actor Michael Cera, playing himself. Cera is, as usual, a charmingly quirky presence, and he plays his scenes with an improvisational giddiness that’s a breath of fresh air whenever he appears. (One particularly nice scene has him apparently abandoning Yi in a restaurant and then returning to surprise her from a back-door route.) He can also switch to more serious mode convincingly.

As for Yi, she’s a more equivocal asset. Her puppets (she made them herself, with help from her father) are clever, but her goofy persona is likely to irritate as many viewers as she delights. But when she interacts, obviously spontaneously, with interviewees—the crowd at a bar, a bunch of kids in a playground—she becomes a more real, and likable, presence. Johnson doesn’t add much as the pseudo-director, though the repeated bit about his “stars” being annoyed by the crew’s intrusions is amusing enough.

The interview subjects are a varied group. Some, like wedding chapel hosts in Las Vegas—one the inevitable Elvis impersonator—are pretty standard fare. But the older couples who discuss how they met and offer vignettes about their lives together are articulate and interesting, and the pool-playing fellow at the start who talks about finding and losing love makes a different point, but an equally valid one. And those rambunctious kids can’t help but win you over. (One complaint: none of these people are identified in captions as they appear. It would be nice to be definitively told who they are.)

Technically there’s not much to be said about “Paper Heart.” Jay Hunter’s HD camerawork has a deliberately on-the-fly look even in the staged passages, and Ryan Brown’s editing is deliberately choppy. The score, by Cera and Yi, is amiable.

The picture closes with a wild parody of Yi and Cera’s romance in action-movie mode, played out in puppet form. It ends this ironic exercise on an appropriately silly note that emphasizes that it’s an all too-cool send-up, but with moments that transcend the hipster mentality it so assiduously cultivates to suggest something deeper.

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TETRO

D

After the ludicrous “Youth Without Youth,” Francis Ford Coppola continues his downward spiral with this florid melodrama about a highly dysfunctional family. The old-fashioned tale could be taken for a lesser work by John Steinbeck in his “East of Eden” period, and the fifties feel is accentuated by the director’s decision to shoot it mostly in black-and-white (the flashbacks are in color). But the splashily flamboyant technique—as much visual overkill as in “One from the Heart”—and goofy philosophizing about creativity and genius is pure, unadulterated Coppola. It’s another deeply embarrassing misfire from a man once considered a major American filmmaker.

The narrative begins with Bennie (newcomer Alden Ehrenreich) arriving in Buenos Aires as a waiter on a cruise ship. He’s come to look up his long-lost older brother, now calling himself Tetro (Vincent Gallo), who fled their home years earlier leaving a note promising to return for his beloved younger sibling—a promise he failed to keep. It turns out that Tetro, a shaggy, abrasive fellow, has pretty much abandoned his writing career and is living with vivacious girlfriend Miranda (Maribel Verdu), occasionally operating the lights at a run-down local theatre run by a womanizer named Jose (Rodrigo De La Serna), where a would-be avant-garde playwright named Abelardo (Mike Amigorena) puts on scandalous shows. He certainly offers no welcome to Bennie, who’s puzzled and saddened by his dismissive attitude.

But when Bennie’s ship suffers a mechanical problem that delays its departure, Tetro reluctantly allows him to stay in his apartment, which allows Bennie to find—and decipher—his brother’s unfinished manuscripts. They reveal—through those color flashbacks—the abusive treatment Tetro suffered from the boys’ dictatorial father, famed orchestral conductor Carlo (Klaus Maria Brandauer), including the final indignity that caused him not only to flee the house but, as we eventually learn, to keep a terrible family secret ever since (a secret that many viewers will have guessed long before Coppola chooses to tell it to us).

By the time that revelation is sprung, though, Bennie has suffered an accident that prevents him from leaving and, after another dustup with Tetro, gives him the opportunity to finish his brother’s uncompleted play and get it accepted as their joint work into the Patagonia Festival, a prestigious arts competition run by the country’s greatest critic, a spectral woman who calls herself Alone (Carmen Maura) and has long dismissed Tetro for failing to realize his full potential.

That sets the stage for what’s easily the worst part of the picture—a couple of ludicrously operatic sequences that reek of pomposity and empty visual ostentation. The first involves the Festival presentation of a scene from the brothers’ play—which earns wild cheers from the starry crowd but is by any measure incredible rubbish. (This is the point at which Tetro’s big revelation also occurs, sending Bennie into an emotional tailspin.) But even that is topped by the sudden announcement of Carlo’s death, which occasions a nutty funeral scene that casts the collapse of the house as though it were the fall of Valhalla in “Gotterdammerung” (though the music is by Brahms, not Wagner).

This is all old-fashioned melodramatic claptrap, served up in ridiculously overblown style. It does have a few virtues. Despite the absurdity of the material, Ehrenreich proves an engaging presence and may be a real find. Verdu is better than the script deserves as well. And though the visual flamboyance has an annoying “look at me” quality, the technical work is impressive, especially given the obviously modest budget. Mihai Malaimare Jr.’s widescreen cinematography has a luminous quality, and the overall production design by Sebastian Orgambide hides the budgetary limitations skillfully.

But while not as pretentious and impenetrable a dish as “Youth Without Youth,” “Tetro” is equally indigestible.