Up for Love (2016)

Laurent Tirard's Up for Love is a French-Belgian romantic comedy built on a single social experiment: a charming man of very short stature courts a successful lawyer, and the audience is asked to watch her wrestle with her own prejudices. Diane loses her phone, Alexandre finds it, and their telephone chemistry leads to a meeting. The surprise is his height. The film treats this as the central obstacle, which gives body acceptance a gentle but unmistakable place in the narrative. There is also a rare central romantic role for a body type seldom granted one. Yet the part is played by Jean Dujardin, an average-height actor, with visual effects doing the work. The gesture toward representation is real but incomplete, a polite nod where a genuine commitment might have stood.

Diane is a divorced, independent lawyer, and the film allows her competence and professional standing. It does not build a feminist argument around them. Her arc remains a romantic one, her choices measured by whom she loves and whether she can endure the stares of strangers. The tolerance theme is handled with a light comic touch. Up for Love wants to be liked, not obeyed. It does not turn to the camera and instruct us on virtue. Its sermonizing is minimal, its moral pressure mild. The wider catalog of contemporary social concerns is not on the menu. This is a heterosexual, contemporary, bourgeois French comedy with one item on its agenda.

As a remake of an Argentine film, it arrives already smoothed for export, and its cultural awareness is soft, almost old-fashioned in its faith that kindness can solve the problem of the gaze. The body positivity is the engine, but the engine is small. We are left with a pleasant, well-meaning picture that asks us to be nicer to people whose bodies differ from the norm. That is not nothing. It is also not a movement. We classify it as a minor vintage: agreeable, faintly instructive, and unlikely to disturb any cellar.