This review is for a film originally viewed at the 22nd Annual Tallgrass Film Festival. WD;ED will update when the film becomes available either in theatres or on VOD.
There’s nothing like a good old cancer weepy. It’s a time-honored genre, usually strongest when about young people in love despite oncoming tragedy. Shalin Shah’s story is perfect material for a film. Unfamiliar with the man? His manifesto, “Thank You, Cancer,” went viral in his twilight days as The Huffington Post picked it up and spread it around. His belief in eternal gratitude and in living life to its fullest is quite inspiring. Of course a movie was going to be made about it.
That’s just what producer Asit Vyas thought, at least. Vyas, a fast-food franchisee-turned producer, decided that his second film would be Shah’s story. He reached out to director Mahesh Pailoor (Brahmin Bulls) and the two set about telling this story. It’s clearly a passion for both of them. At first, I must confess, I thought it was heavily influenced by money from the Peace Corps and that it felt a bit like a recruitment video. Finding out that it wasn’t anything close to that added to the film’s sincerity and softened some of the sharper moments that poked at me.
Shalin Shah (Kapil Talwalkar) is a good kid, from a good family, with a bright future. He’s just graduated from college and is headed out of country for a couple of years to join the Peace Corps. This isn’t sitting quite right with his girlfriend, Fiona (Olivia Liang), parents (Meera Simhan and Faran Tahir), or anyone else. Still, his life of privilege drives him to give back; a noble goal and one that feels sincere. The graduate is a contemplative sort, often meditating and writing down his thoughts in a little journal. Sure, they’re pretty freshman philosophy, but when you’re 21 years old and achingly sincere those kinds of things feel important. Shalin has it all going for him. Except this cough that won’t seem to go away.
A film can often trip over itself when it tries to do too much. Paper Flowers manages to skirt this by taking a page out of Shalin Shah’s journal and aspiring to be nothing but sincere. It finds its formula rather quickly, as all good young-adult cancer weepies should, and manages to stick the landing almost in spite of itself. His parents don’t like his girlfriend because she’s of a different culture, he’s dying but they love each other anyway, he feels better at one point only to take a turn, and so on. These familiar beats are broken up by title cards with quotes from Shalin’s musings, often incredibly corny but earnest. There’s so much that can derail a film like this but the grounded performances from the four main cast members (and Karan Soni, Deadpool’s taxi-driving buddy!) keep everything just steady enough to work.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t a few struggles within the film’s construction. The lighting and makeup throughout the first third of the film is atrocious to the point of distracting. Everyone seems to be a sort of yellowed-out hue, whether it be from how their faces or lit or the makeup being used. Sure, it’s about cancer, but the sickly color-palette is less setting the stage and more of a distraction. Things improve as the film trots along, possibly because we step away from direct sunlight to cloudy skies and interior shots, but for a good chunk of the runtime it is a real problem.
I say this and I still fell to the film’s charisma. Vyas and Pailoor know they have magic in their leads, with chemistry for days and talent to back it up. The romance between Fiona and Shalin is the central piece of Paper Flowers and they pull it off. The conflict with his parents is resolved rather easily and mostly interiorized, a character is revealed as gay in a culture that won’t be accepting and that’s mostly dropped, and even the major setbacks in Shalin’s cancer journey are mostly used to bind these two people together. It’s a romantic film in the veins of The Big Sick or We Live in Time (thought not as comedic or “stiff-upper-lip” as either).
Paper Flowers is a charmer. It’s cheesiness and formulaic structure aside, it’s upheld by a pair of moving performances and a sincerity that I couldn’t get enough of.
WRITE DRUNK; EDIT DRUNK 