A somewhat agreeable romantic comedy carried, for the most part, by the natural chemistry shared by its two attractive stars, Paperback Romance has all the time-tested elements you’d expect from this particular genre, while also throwing in peculiar moments such as a heavy-petting session that goes awry and ends with a broken jaw and a splash of blood. However, the story here isn’t quite as edgy as that last sentence might make it seem. Basically, romance blossoms when Sophie (Carides), a physically handicapped writer of so-called “steamy” short stories (“I gazed at my friend as she made love with the beautiful, smooth-skinned Greek God” is a typical example of her ludicrous prose), meets Eddie (LaPaglia), a handsome jeweler who seems taken with her at first sight, while each is slumming around at the local library. Sure, he’s already engaged and, yeah, she lies about her handicap, but hey, love conquers… well, do I really have to say it? Carides and LaPaglia do indeed exude chemistry to spare (no wonder, they’re a couple off-screen as well as on), but their quiet charm is often lost among a seemingly never-ending series of gimmicky, inconsequential sex scenes (writer-director Lewin goes out of his way to visualize Sophie’s stories as she reads them aloud, usually as soft-focus, orange-tinted bits of cotton-candy blandness) and poorly staged slapstick, not to mention an unnecessarily convoluted, subplot-heavy screenplay that seems distanced from its own characters. Obviously meant to be both sweet and sexy, dark and laugh-out-loud funny, romantic and kinky — you know, the kind of thing Pedro Almodovar could pull off in his sleep — Paperback Romance would instead be almost as forgettable as its amazingly dull title if it weren’t for the presence of its two leads. As the saying goes, they make a great couple, and I’d like to see them keep working together; hopefully, it will be in films superior to this middling effort.
This article appears in October 18 • 1996 (Cover).