Should they have said ‘I do?’

FILM REVIEW

Paper Year Paper Year, named after the traditional gift for firstyear wedding anniversaries, opens where most films fade to black, on a happily ever after. Franny and Dan (Eve Hewson, Avan Jogia) are running merrily from the registry office to the strains of the 1957 hit Young Love.

Why did this young couple tie the knot? It’s never quite made clear in Canadian writer/director Rebecca Addelman’s debut feature.

It’s instructive to note that we’re halfway through the film before Dan asks his bride: “What do you want?” And the best she can come up with is: “I don’t want to fight.” Not exactly the stuff that vows are made of.

Aside from their impossibly cute names, Franny and Dan don’t have much going for them. He’s an actor who hasn’t worked in two years, and lands a gig (if you can call it that) house- and dogsitting for Hailey, a more famous performer who’s shooting a film overseas.

Franny gets a job as a writer on a game show. But the toxic culture there includes a skeevy boss (Brooks Gray) who starts pawing her on day 1, only to fall into a funk when he notices her ring.

And head writer Noah (Hamish Linklater) flirts first and only mentions in passing that he’s also married.

(Addelman spent several years as a writer and story editor for TV’s New Girl, and I’d love to know if these characters are based on anyone in particular.)

Given that everything moves faster these days, Paper Year could have been titled The Six-Month Itch.

Or, if the title hadn’t already been taken, I Give It a Year.

The audience is put in the unenviable position of watching the characters and pondering not whether they’ve made a mistake, but how big and to what end.

It’s a clever concept as far as it goes, but it doesn’t go quite far enough.

Addelman handles the pacing nicely, and the two leads manage to portray their characters as selfcentred and a bit clueless without quite stepping over the line into total-jerkdom, which is quite an achievement.

But a subplot that finds Dan obsessing over Hailey’s conveniently-left-out diary fizzles, as does the larger question of Franny’s crush on Noah.

In the end, I couldn’t get that final scene from The Graduate out of my head; the one that finds Dustin Hoffman and Katharine Ross racing from the church, not yet married, but thrilled to be together — that is, until the camera holds on them long enough for their smiles to fade and doubt to creep into their faces. Paper Year takes a similarly jaundiced view of youthful romance.•••