It’s hard to believe that this new film from French-Canadian Brault isn’t a remake of last year’s Green Card. Seeing as how Paper Wedding was made a year or so in advance of the latter, it may be the other way around. Both films share nearly identical plots, settings, and situations, but that’s where the similarities end. While Peter Weir played the nearly-cliched story of a marriage of convenience for broad, romantic laughs, Brault and crew delve deep into the subtle emotional nuances behind such a pairing. Bujold — shy, quiet, and hesitant as always — is Claire, an unmarried college professor approaching forty and the requisite mid-life crisis. Her only love interest thus far has been with a married man, and she knows in her heart that, though he professes to love her, he will never leave his wife and family. Her outlook is naturally bleak, then, when into her life steps Pablo Torres, an illegal Chilean immigrant who faces torture or worse if he is deported. Prodded by her sister, Claire agrees to marry this stranger in order to secure Canadian residency for him, and thus save his life. As in Green Card, the immigration service soon somes calling and the two strangers are forced to open up to each other in order to save themselves. Again, the storyline here is almost exactly the same as in Weir’s film. Brault, however, bypasses the more comedic aspects of the tale, and instead chooses (wisely, I think) to examine the cautious, hesitant breaking down of the walls between these two terribly different human beings. Both Bujold and Aranguiz are wonderful in their uncertainty: should I tell him this, that, what? It’s this rampant and wholly truthful caution, practically oozing from these two characters, that raises this above the level of just another simple romantic comedy. After all, anyone who’s ever been in love knows all too well that it’s really not that funny.
This article appears in November 1 • 1991 (Cover).