Heartbreaker

This was Pascal Chaumeil’s first feature. He had assisted directors such as Luc Besson in the 1980s and spent years in television; he died in 2015, at 54. The script’s real device is the rule Alex sets himself. His team only breaks up couples where the woman is unhappy without realising it; Juliette and Jonathan are genuinely attached, so the job falls outside the rule before it starts and the film becomes a swindler’s argument with his own code. The clock tightens too, from 10 days to 5. To get close, Alex fakes a passion for Dirty Dancing, Roquefort and George Michael. The Dirty Dancing finale was restaged not in Monaco but at Chez Gégène, a guinguette in Joinville-le-Pont. The schedule ran 1 week in Morocco, 4 in Monaco and 3 in Paris. Against a budget of 8.7 million euros it took 48 million dollars worldwide, collected 5 César nominations and won none, and took best film at the Globes de Cristal. Working Title bought the American remake rights the same year. A good fit if you want a con man walking into his own rule, and the question of how long an act holds. Not for anyone who cannot sit through weeks of surveillance and deception of a woman played as comedy.