Up For Love

Cert: 12A. Selected cinemas.

Successful, attractive lawyer Diane (Virginie Efira) gets in from a busy day at the Marseilles firm she owns with her exhusband and the phone rings. On the other end is a charming stranger called Alexandre (The Artist’s Jean Dujardin) who informs her that he has found the mobile phone that she left behind in a café. The exchange is easy and pleasant, so when he asks her on a date to give the phone back, she happily agrees.

Only when Alexandre walks in at the rendezvous the following day, it turns out that he is 4’ 7” and this, of course, is a problem for all but the most secure of women. Diane cannot put the issue to bed, and after a whirlwind romance with the kind, successful, entertaining and sincere Alexandre, she fails to show enough spine to be proud of her relationship with him.

Despite this immediate impediment to liking Diane, Up For Love is an exercise in formulaic charm whereby every gentle bend in the narrative road can be seen from a mile off and enough cute chuckles are stirred up on the path to eventual redemption.

Director Laurent Tirard set out to do a Eurocentric rewrite of the 2013 Argentinian hit Corazón de León, and mostly succeeds with the brief. Dujardin is cleverly shrunk in the scenes, his goldenage-of-Hollywood charisma alone swelling Alexandre’s stature. Trope characters – the mortifying mum, the sleazy ex, the kooky secretary – orbit Diane effectively.