Heartbreaker
It's more expensive than setting up Hollywood pitch meetings, but it can be more effective, too: Make your movie in French, cast it with appealing French stars, and then screen the finished product for the studios. Somebody's bound to think an English-language remake is a good idea.
It's more expensive than setting up Hollywood pitch meetings, but it can be more effective, too: Make your movie in French, cast it with appealing French stars, and then screen the finished product for the studios. Somebody's bound to think an English-language remake is a good idea.
And, yes, Universal has announced that that's exactly what they'll be doing with Heartbreaker, director Pascal Chaumeil's larky exercise in rom-com cynicism. With Romain Duris and Vanessa Paradis (Mrs. Johnny Depp to you) onboard in the leads, Heartbreaker is unapologetic high-concept: A guy and his two able assistants hire themselves out to wealthy parties who would like to see a relationship broken up. Say you have a daughter who's about to be wed and you don't like the prospective groom. Alex Lippi (Duris) will, for the right price, find a way to seduce the bride-to-be and torpedo the marriage.
After establishing its premise with a bust-up in Morocco (Alex pretends to be a dashing Doctor Without Borders-type, making a vacationing schoolteacher realize her boyfriend is a worthless lug), Heartbreaker moves to the not unsightly hotels and port-side promenades of Monaco. Here, Juliette Van Der Becq (Paradis), a wine expert with a winning smile, is engaged to a dapper Englishman (Andrew Lincoln). But Juliette's father will have none of it, and so Alex and his team - armed with dossiers of personal data and state-of-the-art spyware - move in for the kill. They have 10 days before the nuptials.
But as Juliette resists Alex's overtures, Alex falls for Juliette for real. Guess where that goes.
Duris, who starred in The Beat That My Heart Skipped, and Paradis, the girl in Girl on the Bridge, are a likable duo, and there are a few genuinely amusing moments, several of which involve Juliette's pop-cult obsessions - the songs of George Michael, the sexy clinches of Dirty Dancing.
But Heartbreaker has a schematic quality to it, a plot line and side characters that could have popped out of a screenwriting computer program. If it weren't for the subtitles, the film would already feel Hollywood-made.
OK, so let's cast the remake: How about Bradley Cooper as the romantic saboteur and Rachel McAdams, say, as his target? Coming to a theater near you. . . .
- Steven Rea