NOBODY ever put up a statue to someone who said, “Nobody ever put up a statue to a critic,” but it’s the libels that really wound those of us in this profession. Take the claim that critics always prefer foreign films to the sturdy American product. Why, if you wanted a better example of glossy, inane dreck than Heartbreaker, you would have to go to France for it.
Dumbed down for the export audience, and including English dialogue for those who need a rest from the subtitles, this moldy farce is pretty close to free of redeeming quality. If you cut out Julie Ferrier, the kind of cute, kind of aggravatingly elfish actress who played the contortionist in Micmacs, you could call it completely free. Director Pascal Chaumiel has done extensive work in TV and advertising, and he was also connected to Luc Besson as the second-unit director on The Fifth Element and Besson’s bad 1998 Joan of Arc movie. Learning under the master of slick, slack-jawed French filmmaking, Chaumiel seems to have eliminated anything but strictly commercial content from this debut.
Romain Duris plays Alex—a three-day-stubbled scruff on the lines of Hugh Laurie; he’s the head of a three-person team of consultants brought in to break up undesirable romances. Using different identities and the help of his sister (Ferrier) and brother-in-law (Francois Damiens), Alex seduces women away from relationships that would make them unhappy. His latest job is breaking the engagement of a British man—a wealthy philanthropist—and a French heiress, Juliette (Vanessa Paradis, an ultrastarved version of Lauren Hutton, with a more capacious gap between her teeth). In Monaco, Alex poses as a bodyguard to follow his target. Juliette proves resistant. Slapstick intervals ensue. Some interest boils up with the first appearance of Héléna Noguerra, a lively Belgian TV personality who plays Juliette’s drunken and slutty best friend. Sadly Noguerra fails to cause the kind of trouble she seems to suggest she’ll cause when she first appears. Juliette is characterized as this perfect chic woman whose only concession to vulnerability is a craze for the movie Dirty Dancing; her arrogance is supposed to be charm. This would make it easy for anyone, no matter how basically one note, to steal the show, but the show steals back, so to speak. It never gets beyond its long soak in expensive locations; the script wheezes as it tries to reach the insurmountable height of its high concept plot. The Moroccan opening sequence and the endless drives around the hills over Monaco might make up a date movie, but the audience would have to be under some kind of heavy sedation to tune out everything else.
Unrated; 109 min.
Opens Friday, Camera 7, Campbell
