Adapting from real-life events, Mahesh Pailoor’s “Paper Flowers” struggles to find texture and a lived-in personality. It’s forever strapped to a reminder of lessons to be drawn, the sincerity of the endeavour, but barely manages to grant individuality and agency to the modelled characters. As a result, Shalin Shah’s (Kapil Talwalkar) story comes off as merely summoned, never a full-bodied personage with expressive likes and dislikes. Where are the rougher edges of human imperfections? Pailoor gestures to anxieties fleetingly, airbrushing them within the more upbeat intonations of Shah’s message.
A fresh graduate in the US, Shalin is all set to go abroad where he will volunteer with the Peace Corps. He has had a relationship with Fiona (Olivia Liang) for years, but his parents aren’t big on it since she’s from a different culture. She chafes at being omitted from his family, despite her father gently nudging that Shalin might be from a more conservative background and that she must be patient.
There’s a lot of prevailing niceness, but not a sight of sharp teeth. For all the film’s simple-mindedness, it never tapers into the more complicated considerations of life. The difficulties are rounded out in the service of inspirational talk. Soon after Shalin lands abroad and starts working in modest straits, he gets sick and has to rush back home to the States for a pressing diagnosis. That he has cancer is quickly unravelled, throwing his life and those he loves into abject turmoil and anguish. It’s what eventually brings Fiona closer to his parents, united in their love and concern for him.
The film never transcends the trappings of an emotional tearjerker, built around cancer. It’s designed to tug at your heartstrings, drawing out maximum emotion on the fuel of its protagonist’s persistent courage. Shalin squarely deals with his sickness. He resists being circumscribed by it, rather snatching as much joy as possible from life’s bare residues. He’s determined to have his last hurrah as spectacularly and radiantly open to life’s wonder. Shalin won’t be cut down by his circumstances, reduced to the tragedy of his life ending. Whatever remains of it, he will seize beauty in every pore of the world. You are left pining for keener sensations, instead of the sweeping outlines in which “Paper Flowers” seems content to peddle.
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“Paper Flowers” tries to score every emotional beat but is routinely squandered by awkward, inept craft. Technically, it’s a mess, unable to pierce through a fog of ugly, superimposing lighting. It has one of those distracting visual patinas that seems impossible to shake off, even as scenes whittle past. Time passes, but it’s never keenly felt. In turn, this compounds the conviction within the protagonist’s realisation of clutching onto life with unmitigated zeal and energy. When that passion for life stirs anew, it never bristles into form as a vivid, moving moment.
It’s an effete one. When such a vital epiphany lands, it should have felt like a rousing moment. But the film drapes it within banality. After Shalin pushes his partner away, urging her to forget him and move on, she has a teary moment in the car, gathers herself, and storms back in to assert her choice in the situation. He embraces her back. The shift feels as slight as possible in spite of the momentous realisation Shalin has had.
Specificities are vacuous here. The lack of subtle, delicate writing turns everyone and everything into broad sketches. The appeal turns generic, nothing more than a dubious endorsement of the Peace Corps, twinned with a teary, life-affirming, lesson-giving true story. It’s the kind of film that insists on its own importance, urges you to value every moment in life as if it were the final one. While the emotion is undeniably effective at times, given the easy design, it doesn’t hold up for too long.
Both Kapil Talwalkar and Olivia Liang can’t do much to salvage the film beyond being something whose emotional orchestration can be sniffed from a mile. They do share a chemistry that gets muffled by the cancer-pivoted emotional dimension. There’s an impulse to oversimplify, treat the whole thing with kiddie gloves. Deriving positivity from the harshest of circumstances is a worthy appeal, but here, it’s hemmed in from all sides by patently dull filmmaking. Pailoor takes a patronising gaze at the characters, despite going for emotionally wrenching inclinations.
Problems extend to the thin, unconvincing supporting characters whose conflicts tend to be expiated away. There’s the gay best friend whose secret parallel life is only dangled summarily. Even Shalin’s parents, who are initially posed as major supporting characters, have their dilemmas sorted out too tidily. “Paper Flowers” lacks a throbbing density of human feeling, the full mesh of it being stowed into mildness instead of sobering weight. Its elements and tracks hover but are never conjoined into something impactful. What further undoes it is a literal, embarrassingly insipid Peace Corps advert pegged at the climax, tying Shalin’s story into a neat bow.
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