A Chinese immigrant resorts to initiating a sham marriage to stay in the USA in Jeff Man’s low-key and low-budget drama Paper Marriage. It is an independent feature from noted mumblecore producers Mark and Jay Duplass, which has seemingly missed out on decent distribution and wound up on free-to-play streamer Tubi. With any luck the target audience will find it there, and I’m sure they’ll appreciate the free movie.

Fanny (Effy Han) is a Chinese IT consultant working in the USA whose working visa is about to expire. To stay in the country she attempts to score a green card via marriage – and to that end she hires unemployed Jeff (Man) to pretend to be her husband. It seems a simple arrangement – she is paying him a thousand dollars a month with free rent and board. After a year, however, they will both be interviewed by an immigration officer to rule their relationship is genuine.

It would be easy to assume Paper Marriage was a predictable sort of opposites-attract romance, in which a year of faking marriage leads its two protagonists to fall in love for real. Those expectation are not, however, met by the film Jeff Man has actually written and directed. What viewers actually receive is a deeply understated and thoughtfully observed character study. It focuses on two people who are distinctively different from one another, and who are ultimately never particularly compatible as romantic partners. What Man’s film explores is not a love that springs from unusual circumstances, but instead a patient realisation what individual people want in a situation where they very well may never get it.

Fanny and Jeff are both very well-crafted characters, with a grounded balance of positive and negative traits. They are both capable of earning audience sympathy and of losing it, and the balance that is achieved in-between is what makes Paper Marriage neatly effective. It is admittedly a film low of incident – it is mostly conversations between the leads over a period of 12 months or more – but there is a ring of truth, and a lot of entertainment value for more patient viewers.

It is perhaps not surprising that the character played by the writer-director is the more thoughtfully developed. There is a wonderful ironic contrast where Fanny – professional, driven, and already well established with a job and friends – is fighting to remain in the USA while Jeff – who was born there – struggles to find a full-time job or make meaningful human connections.

A small supporting cast deliver decent naturalistic performances, including Rob Nagle, Grace Song, and Michael and Ursula Man as Jeff’s doting parents – unless their surname is an astonishing coincidence it looks like Jeff Man hired his own parents for the film. The film is neatly but unfussily photographed by Norbert Shieh. Goh Nakamura’s musical score is likeable, but perhaps a little too on the nose.

Paper Marriage is a decently made light drama, but with American cinema shifting so aggressively from mid-budget films to low and high extremes it is becoming easier and easier for these sorts of modest independents to get overlooked. Thankfully this particularly example is about as easy to legally access as can possibly be.

Paper Marriage is currently streaming in Australia on Tubi. In the USA it is available to rent from Amazon and Apple+.