When Charlyne Yi, a geeky girl in thick glasses and boyish clothes, thrusts a microphone at shoppers in a mall, asking if they've ever been in love, most give her wide berth. Soon enough, her indie film on the vagaries of love, Paper Heart, finds another, more effective way to answer her pressing question.
Paper Heart is a movie about a movie about Yi's knowledge quest. She's an agnostic on the existence of love becau%uFFFDse she's never experienced it. With camera crew in tow, Yi launches on a zigzag, cross-country road trip, interviewing people from many walks of life on their views of love. While doing research, she meets an amusing, easygoing guy called Michael Cera. They begin to date, sharing pizza, park benches and long walks. He becomes the co-star of her movie, when he'd rather just enjoy a normal, camera-free relationship. Paper Heart's single note of suspense is whether or not there will be a happy ending for Cera and the still skeptical Yi.
Meanwhile, Yi conducts her interviews with everyone from a gay Manhattan couple to a schoolyard of children in Atlanta. Although she suspects that romance began in fairy tales and was compounded by Hollywood movies, she finds herself a lonely heretic in a world of believers. Even a divorced man, wary of falling in love again, understands the force of the emotion because he experienced it so keenly. Occasionally, the rambling narrative is brightened by Yi's idiosyncratic marionette shows, a sort of "Punch and Judy" illustration of the stories she collects.
Perhaps the most insightful answer Yi received about love comes from a biology professor, who begins by theorizing on love's evolutionary advantagemore children to perpetuate the genetic lines of male and female loversand ends with the admission that, at bottom, love is mystical, a little magical.
