Love is wonderful ... until it’s not
The thrill of youthful romance slowly turns to doubt in Paper Year
Paper Year, named after the traditional gift for first-year 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 1956 hit Young Love.
Why did this young couple tie the knot? It’s never quite made clear in Ottawa-born 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.”
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 dog-sitting for Hailey (Daniela Barbosa), a more famous performer who’s shooting a film overseas.
Franny gets a job as a writer on a game show. But the job includes a skeevy boss who starts pawing her on day one, 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 SixMonth 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 andtowhatend.
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 self-centred 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.