Disappointing Heartbreaker Lives Up to Its Title
Alex Lippi (Romain Duris) is a master of seduction. But his reasons for using this skill on unsuspecting women isn’t a nefarious one, at least it isn’t according to him, his sister Mélanie (Julie Ferrier) or her husband Marc (François Damiens). You see, they’re in business together, the business of breaking up unhappy couples, Alex the nuclear missile the trio use on the unsuspecting female heart in order to get them to realize they deserve better than the situation they’re currently a part of.
Romain Duris and Vanessa Paradis in Heartbreaker © IFC Films
They do have rules. The couple must be engaged, not married. There has to be a reason for them to begin the process of instigating a break-up. Most importantly, the woman must be legitimately unhappy, the impending marriage one certain to doom her to a painfully unfulfilling life no one should ever have to endure.
So why, then, are they beginning the process of stopping the impending nuptials of wealthy wine expert Juliette Van Der Becq (Vanessa Paradis). To put it simply, Alex doesn’t have a choice in the matter. He owes far too much money to all the wrong people, and the cash the woman’s father (Jacques Frantz) is offering is too great a sum for him to be able to refuse. But a man can’t practice seduction for a living and expect his heart to remain switched off forever, and Juliette is the type of smart, sexy woman who could prove to be a far greater test of his abilities than he’s capable of handling.
A second unit director on a number of Luc Besson pictures including The Fifth Element and The Professional, filmmaker Pascal Chaumeil’s Heartbreaker does show a certain amount of skill and flamboyance that’s easy to like. Even though he’s making a romantic comedy his film has a certain idiosyncratic visual flair that’s perfectly charming, the whole thing rolling to a conclusion with almost archaic ostentation.
I just wish he’d have had his trio of screenwriters spend more time working on the sadly half-baked script. As romantic comedies go, this one has a great premise, a handful of interesting characters and schizophrenic scenario that sadly does very little with any of its positives. While it offers up plenty of amusing bits, it doesn’t do so with anything close to consistency, and when push finally comes to shove the climactic moments are about as emotionally rapturous as a swift kick to the cliché factory head.
Thankfully the two stars almost manage to rise above the fray making all of this, not just worthwhile, but borderline fabulous. It’s almost hard to believe Duris is the same guy from The Beat My Heart Skipped, Molière and Paris. He’s just so freakishly charming, behaving like some Gallic combination of Peter Sellers and Peter O’Toole. The guy is just having so much fun inhabiting Alex and all his smoothly seductive personas just watching him glide across the screen is joyful unto itself, and no matter what he’s doing or who he is conversing with being in his presence was more often than not an outright blast.
As for Paradis, even with all her fame and notoriety I can’t really say I remember any of her earlier performances. Yet she’s positively enchanting here, sharing a chemistry with Duris that is charmingly palpable. She really does seem to get right down inside Juliette, the actress hinting at complexities and dimensions the script barely gives the time of day let alone tries to flesh out.
But the two can only do so much. As the film progresses the elements keeping them apart become more and more nebulous and nonsensical, and at a certain point the central contrivances begin to annoy in a manner that’s not remotely captivating. The final third is tiresome and way too overly familiar, and while the dialogue can have some spunk to it from time to time there’s not enough to compensate for its continuous lack of wit.
Chaumeil tries to cover up these flaws as best he can, and for all it lacks in originality his skill at keeping the pace running at a speed that makes events seem more interesting and new than they actually are is laudable. He also stages some great set piece moments, including a series of Dirty Dancing homage sequences that built to a crescendo where they honestly made me laugh a tiny bit out loud. The director also shows a gift for foreshadowing, letting little moments of dialogue hint at events and character moments in the final act I tended to revel in.
I just wish the sum of these pieces added up to something a lot more worthwhile. By the time the inevitable happened I was sort of over it all, and whether or not Alex and Juliette finally came to their senses and realized they were meant to be together didn’t matter as much to me as it obviously needed to. Chaumeil shows talent, and the performances, especially by the leads, are universally solid but it just doesn’t end up being enough. In the end Heartbreaker lived up to its title, not delivering on its potential and becoming just another disappointing romantic comedy I just couldn’t bring myself to love.
Film Rating: êê1/2 (out of 4)
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