L’arnacoeur (Movie Review)

L’arnacoeur (Heartbreaker)

Romantic Comedy, French, 2010, 104 minutes, directed by Pascal Chaumeil

Medium:  Netflix Streaming (Available on DVD)

Rating:  4.0 (5-point system)

Alex Lippi (Romain Duris) is in business with his sister Melanie (Julie Ferrier) and brother-in-law Marc (François Damiens).  Together, they are a formidable, never-fail team of professional relationship breakers.  Suspect that your daughter’s boyfriend is a skirt-chasing louse?  Think your son is dating beneath his station?  Want to wrest your former boyfriend from the clutches of your ex-best friend?  Alex, Melanie, and Marc are your go-to people . . . for a hefty price.  But they won’t break up just any couple.  They’ll only agree to break apart people who are truly not made for each other or who are otherwise unhappy in their relationship.

That is until Alex gets in trouble with his bookie and the bookie’s huge enforcer Goran, who enjoys dangling deadbeats over balcony railings until they promise to pay up.  €30,000 Euros of debt and a ten-story encounter with Goran convince Alex to loosen his principles when a Mr. Van der Becq offers to hire the team for €50,000 to stop the rapidly approaching nuptials of his daughter Juliette (Vanessa Paradis) to Englishman Jonathan (Andrew Lincoln).

The trouble is that Juliette and Jonathan truly are the perfect couple.  How good is the kind-hearted Jonathan?  In one memorable and very funny scene, the team (with Marc disguised as a homeless street person) spy on Jonathan and Juliette from outside an expensive restaurant.  When they observe Jonathan asking for a doggie bag, they conclude he is too cheap for the fair Juliette.  Alas, when the couple exits the restaurant, Jonathan steps over to the apparently down-and-out Marc and hands him the doggie bag for his meal.

Despite his ethics, Alex pressures Melanie and Marc into taking the job.  Now Alex has only days to intercede before the peal of wedding bells, desperately trying to pry apart a perfect couple all the while dodging the lumbering, hulking, ever-present Goran.

It’s all a lot of fun with beautiful Monte Carlo serving as the film’s glitzy canvas.  Elegant people, glamorous fashion, breathtaking views, and flashy cars abound as the scenery flashes by as quickly and with as much class as the Ferrari Alex “borrows” to impress his Juliette.

Thank you, Jason G. Anderson of Word Pursuit.  It appears I have a new fan.  Jason just yesterday posted on his blog Word Pursuit a review of Decisions.  How impressed was Jason?  Impressed enough to score Decisions at 4.5 on his blog.  And since Amazon doesn’t allow fractional reviews, Jason has announced that he’s rounding his score up to a perfect 5 when he posts his review on the Decisions Product Page.

Tomorrow’s The Big Day: Look for Decisions to be featured on Daily Cheap Reads, a site dedicated to finding and publicizing books priced at $5 or less for budget-conscious Kindle users.  It’s slated to go up at 5 p.m. Central time.  Thank you, Paula Haataja.

And One More: Fellow indie author Linda S. Prather has scheduled a mention of Decisions in her blog Linda S. Prather-Author.  She expects that entry to run either tomorrow or Wednesday.  Thank you, Linda.  Looking forward to it.