L’arnacoeur

Pascal Chaumeil (2010)

Not only have Working Title films already bought the rights for a US remake but this French language film is being released through Universal.  It’s been a box-office hit in France (and Belgium and Switzerland) and you can understand why.  The screenplay by Laurent Zeitoun and Jeremy Doner takes off from a nifty idea.  Alex, his sister Mélanie and her husband Marc are professional breakers-up of relationships – through Alex’s seduction of the girl in the relationship.  You might expect at least their first coup to be executed before the audience is told what they’re up to; in fact, that’s explained immediately.  This makes you wonder how substantial Heartbreaker‘s initial hook is going to be.  Sure enough, the script is soon attached to a more familiar but commercially dependable story – the bodyguard who falls in love with the woman he’s guarding.  Alex, Mélanie and Marc’s latest assignment involves Alex’s pretending to be paid to keep an eye on Juliette, the daughter of a rich man who wants to stop her imminent wedding.  Most of the action takes place in Monaco and most of the photography (by Thierry Arbogast) makes you feel you’re watching a commercial.   It’s clear enough from all this that Heartbreaker is calculated and shallow: it’s designed for an audience that’s largely affectless but still expects a feelgood ending.  The film is also pretty enjoyable.

Heartbreaker seems to view its characters as agreeably cynical and the same could be said for the movie itself.  The mission statement of the heartbreaking outfit claims that Alex, Mélanie and Marc break up only relationships that involve women who are ‘unknowingly unhappy’.  In other words, those paying for the team’s services, however emotionally biased that may be, can see the truth that the unhappy women are blind to.  Pascal Chaumeil directs the proceedings in a cheerfully disengaged style.  He appears, for example, to have worked out quotas of sex and violence.  The latter can be termed light-hearted only because it’s so perfunctory.  Alex is briefed about Juliette’s liking for Dirty Dancing, Roquefort and George Michael and his seduction strategy includes feigning similar enthusiasms.   Leaving aside the cheese component, this is a good example of the film’s killing two birds with one stone, in terms of appealing to the audience.  Those who share Juliette’s musical tastes get ‘Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go’ on the car radio and a pastiche (although it’s a bit weedy) of the big Patrick Swayze-Jennifer Grey routine.   Those who don’t share these tastes get their moment when Alex admits he can’t stand George Michael and has never seen Dirty Dancing.   (The fact that Juliette, as Vanessa Paradis plays her, seems an unlikely fan of either is almost beside the point.)

When Alex and Juliette have parted – it seems terminally and with his enterprise a professional and a personal failure – he trudges back to the airport with Mélanie and Marc, and she heads for her wedding to her English fiancé Jonathan.   Then Alex thinks again and sprints from the departures desk to wherever the wedding is happening; Juliette meanwhile absconds from the marriage service.  Pinching from Runaway Bride-type movies as well as The Graduate suggests an amused self-awareness on the part of the film-makers that one or the other trope wouldn’t supply alone.  The sarcastic overkill has the effect of transcending the clichés on which it’s based.  The audience can choose between laughing along with the director at his shameless unoriginality or enjoy the moment when Alex and Juliette are reunited – or both.

This movie is seldom amusing when it’s trying to be laugh-out-loud-funny but it’s often likeable, thanks to Vanessa Paradis and, especially, Romain Duris.   No one else in Heartbreaker counts for much.  As Mélanie, Julie Ferrier is good enough but the plot requires her and the droll-looking François Damiens (Marc) to put on a succession of tedious disguises, and the routines involving this pair depend too much on crass racial humour.  The best that can be said for Andrew Lincoln as Jonathan is that he’s sufficiently boring to make you hope Juliette won’t marry him.  A confidante like the nymphomaniac Sophie (Héléna Noguerra) raises doubts about Juliette’s taste in girl friends too.  The actors playing Jonathan’s parents (Geoffrey Bateman and Natasha Cashman) would be a disgrace in a British television sitcom.  They’re so broad that you wonder not only how Pascal Chaumeil can have allowed this but if some of the French cast look better than they really are simply because they’re not speaking English.  When she opens her mouth, that gap between her front teeth gives Vanessa Paradis an individuality you don’t expect from her cover-girl prettiness when her lips are sealed.  I liked the way she made Juliette never entirely readable.  Skinny, athletic Romain Duris is shorter than I’d realised from The Beat that My Heart Skipped.  Because this actor has such charm, he isn’t offensive even when he’s asked to do crude things; when Alex’s feelings get serious Duris brings off the change of mood effortlessly.  The moment when the seduction of Juliette nearly happens then doesn’t – a protracted non-kiss between Duris and Paradis – is very gracefully done.

12 July 2010