Fridae

Only the French can make a film that cynically thumbs at the idea of romance while ironically reaffirming it. Here, Romain Duris leads a team of professionals who, for a not so small fee, will break up the couple of your choice – but only if the female is unknowingly unhappy. Duris takes the plum role as the charismatic leading man who wins the women by pulling every cheesy courtship trick from every other cheesy romantic film – an entertaining way to parody the entire romcom genre.

Obviously, the film will pair Duris with his biggest challenge – a woman who seems impervious to his charms because she is apparently happily in love with her fiancé. With a debt collector on his heels and a tight schedule to achieve his results, the increasingly desperate arranges hilarious and slapstick situations that clearly lampoon the entire romcom genre.

Heartbreaker is a film that wears its cynicism about love on its sleeve. It’s thanks to its strong script that it manages to get the audience to agree with its almost misanthropic premise, and to laugh along with it. It’s also the strong script that enables the film to reaffirm the same ideas of romance and true love without making the audience feel cheated.

You’ll be warned that Heartbreaker is no Priceless (another cynical romcom about love and romance). It does take a kitchen sink approach to comedy, and some of the jokes do fall flat. What makes up for these misses is the film’s heartfelt tribute to the late Patrick Swayze, incorporating sequences from Dirty Dancing into some of its more funny routines.

While cynical, this comedy is still easy and light-hearted, and should be great even (or especially) if you’re not a fan of romcoms. It’s as subversive and funny as a Singaporean comedy about a group of elderly con artists who pretend to be unhappy, senile, abandoned inmates of a nursing home.