Heartbreaker (2010)

There is a particular pleasure in encountering a film so thoroughly untouched by the anxieties of its own era. Heartbreaker, released in 2010 and directed by Pascal Chaumeil in his feature debut, concerns Alex (Romain Duris), a man who runs a small agency with his sister and her husband, breaking up relationships for paying clients. The clients are rich. The women are unhappy without realizing it. Alex seduces them, then vanishes. This is the moral universe we are asked to inhabit, and the film asks for nothing more than a shrug and a smile.

Our classification instruments, calibrated for the current decade, register almost nothing. The cast is uniformly white, in a manner that suggests the filmmakers never considered the question. The film has no interest in the identities and grievances that now occupy the culture's attention, and it offers no rebuttal to its own seducer premise. Its attitude toward money is that money is a thing you owe to a loan shark and must work off. That is not a critique of capital. That is a plot device with a deadline attached.

The final act, in which Alex confesses he hates Roquefort and George Michael and has never seen Dirty Dancing, is the closest the film comes to a thesis. It is a thesis about lying to women in order to sleep with them, softened by charm. There is no sermon here, no lecture, no attempt to instruct the audience in virtue. The film simply wants you to enjoy yourself. We note this without judgment. The archive requires completeness, and the archive must record that Heartbreaker is a 2010 French romantic comedy that behaves exactly like one.