Stream It Or Skip It: ‘Paper Lives’ on Netflix, a Turkish Melodrama About a Career Dumpster Diver and the Orphan Boy He Takes In

Netflix movie Paper Lives is a melodrama hailing from Turkey and boasting veteran director Can Ulkay and star Cagatay Ulusoy (of Netflix series The Protector). It’s set on the hardscrabble streets of Istanbul, where castoffs and orphans get by dumpster-diving for recyclables — or they just park their butts on the cobble and huff glue. Now let’s see if this neo-Dickensian story has enough dramatic oomph to warrant a watch.

PAPER LIVES: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

The Gist: We meet Mehmet (Ulusoy) in one of the backalley mazes of Istanbul, scrounging cardboard from a dumpster and stuffing it into a big rickshaw-like sack-cart. It starts to rain buckets. He staggers back to a warehouse. He’s drenched. He collapses into a chair as his friend Gonzi (Ersin Arici) expresses concern. Mehmet throws up violently. They trek through the torrent to the emergency room, where we see the scars on Mehmet’s back. He’s been overworking himself. He’s on the kidney transplant list. Back in his grungy apartment, he pees blood, takes a handful of pills and passes out on his couch.

The next day, he’s not at all the pathetic character we’ve seen so far. He wakes up, cleans up the place a bit, bathes and dresses and heads out. He cheerfully banters with the oddball folks on the street, hands a fiver to a homeless kid and tells him he better not buy glue with it. Turns out, Mehmet is kind of a bigshot. He runs the waste warehouse, managing a fleet of grubby guys who gather cardboard, plastic and glass and cash it in by the pound. The guys call each other ���brother” because, one presumes, they’re all former street urchins and consider the crew to be family. They even go to the bathhouse together and scrub each other’s backs and get in splashfights.

Gonzi drops his cart and calls it a day. Mehmet scribbles in the books and counts the moolah when he hears a noise. The cart crashes over and a kid scrambles out of it like a scared animal. Mehmet lures the kid out with the promise of some food and learns his name is Ali. He’s covered with bruises. He says his mother tossed him in the sack to save him from his abusive stepfather. Surely Mehmet sees a bit of himself in the kid, and takes him under his wing. He throws a party for Ali, teaches him how to swim, even welds together a trash cart for the kid. If only Mehmet’s big heart could compensate for that kidney. This sure seems like something of a precarious situation, taking in a kid so quickly without consulting any authorities. Mehmet says he’ll help Ali find his mother and save them from the evil stepfather, but you know what they say about best laid plans.

What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: You don’t get movies about trash pickers very often. But this orphan story exists somewhere between Slumdog Millionaire and Annie.

Performance Worth Watching: Ulusoy gives a warm, likeable performance, and does his damnedest to keep this movie grounded in a recognizable emotional reality. But after a while, this movie hops the rails, and that’s something beyond his control.

Memorable Dialogue: “Dying is not a problem. But what about the dreams we have?” — Mehmet, just before he gets out the bucket list he wrote with Gonzi, the top of which reads, “find your mother”

Sex and Skin: None.

Our Take: Did I mention the events of Paper Lives occur in a place called Struggle Alley? So it’s not always subtle, but its heart is in the right place, aiming for warmth and a bit of charm and winding up with some beefy drama, heavy emphasis on the melo-. Abused kid, ailing man — it all seems to be steering to a very sad place, and we gird ourselves accordingly.

Problem is, the film amasses plenty of goodwill before it torpedoes itself with some third-act shenanigans that some will call clever plotting and others will call ridiculous as a pig in a Porsche. I’m in the latter camp. What could’ve been a pleasantly melancholy, big-emotion tearjerker takes a turn for the manure pile once Ali — and this isn’t really a spoiler — falls in with the serial glue sniffers, and we start stifling laughter as the movie hits some hard WTFIGO terrain. The struggle in this alley is real.

Our Call: SKIP IT. Paper Lives starts strong, holds on pretty well, then blows it hard at the end.

John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. Read more of his work at johnserbaatlarge.com or follow him on Twitter: @johnserba.

Stream Paper Lives on Netflix