Heartbreaker
Heartbreaker is quite a cunning piece of light entertainment from promising new director Pascal Chaumeil. It’s a fun story delivered as a gentle comedy with a strong nod to farce, but farce for the modern age—faster, shinier and with more respect for women.
The scruffily seductive Alex Lippi (the versatile Romain Duris) is a heartbreaker for hire; he breaks up couples for sizeable sums paid by jilted lovers or wealthy disapproving parents. But he has his own code of ethics: he only charms women who are “unhappy but don’t know it”.
His ruses are elaborately staged with almost Bond-like panache with the help of his two able teammates, Mélanie and Marc (Julie Ferrier and François Damiens), often involving international travel, electronic wizardry, a carefully developed script and a lot of acting (some of it deliberately laughable), and while Alex follows his own code, business goes according to plan – almost. He hazardously owes a chunk of money to a loan shark who employs a very large thug.
When a rich businessman gives him a week him to wreck the perfectly happy relationship of his headstrong executive daughter and her handsome English fiancée, Alex breaks his own rules to clear his debt—and his troubles really begin.
The daughter, Juliette (singer, model, actress and Mrs Johnny Depp, Vanessa Paradis), is no pushover; intelligent, a capable professional and very sturdily in love, she is impervious to Alex’s usual wiles and he is forced to up his game. Posing as her bodyguard and armed with the information that she has a weakness for George Michael’s music, the Dirty Dancing movie and Roquefort cheese for breakfast, Alex makes some ground, then loses it again…and his heart in the process.
As a viewer you’re put in the interesting position of wanting him to both win and lose, and as the plot twists and loops like the Monaco hillside roads it features, the film-makers hold out staunchly on the outcome until the very last scene.
It’s quite a satisfying bit of fun for modern audiences; it’s got fast cars and gadgetry and some slapstick humour in it for the guys; and an endearing male lead and a delightfully strong female role with enough chemistry to appeal to the girls. It’s a great premise and there’s lots of chic styling set against southern European backdrops.
If you’re not a fan of the genre, Heartbreaker won’t convert you, but if you like comedies with romance, a good storyline and more than a single brain cell, this is one of the better of its kind. It has delightful moments, excruciatingly cheesy moments, some very funny ones and a soupçon of violence. It’s a tiddly bit uneven, slows a bit in the third quarter and seems a little bit unsure of its comedic lineage. But that said, it crosses the cultural divide brilliantly—far better than other French comedies like Welcome to the Sticks—and leaves you feeling entertained and refreshed by some of its originality. It has a deft and lively script by Chaumeil and his writing team (Laurent Zeitoun, Jeremy Doner and Yohan Gromb). Duris’s great display of dramatic and comic elasticity gained him a Satellite Award nomination for Best Actor.
This was a smash hit in France, and now Working Title films has acquired the rights for a US version. Watch this one, or watch it first; it’s likely that when they subtract the Euro flair, Gallic expression and insert a couple of synthetic, mainstream leads, that remake could be very forgettable.
Maria Polglase
