Up For Love

Diane (Efira) has enough on her plate running a law practice with her ex (Kahn) without losing her mobile. She receives a call from a charming man who says he has found her phone and both arrange a lunch date the next day for the handover. Intrigued by this confident, flirty guy Diane wonders if romance could be in the air… until she meets him. Alexandre (Dujardin) is handsome, kind, rich and has a killer smile. He’s also four feet five inches tall. Hmm. But within an hour the silvery-tongued architect has convinced her to join him sky-diving and has begun worming his way into her heart. However, he's five feet four inches tall.

Up For Love doesn’t know what to do with itself. Every time it ventures into giddy comedy territory that pushes the boundaries of good taste (if this was an American movie it would have Adam Sandler and Katherine Heigl as leads) it pulls back into sweetness, as if it's embarrassed by the jokes it's come up with.

In one sequence reminiscent of that Sex and the City episode where Samantha contemplates and then balks on a relationship with a confident but diminutive man, Diane buys a jumper for Alexandre in the boy's department… which leads to a cringey scenario when both Alexandre and the store's assistant meet wearing the same jumper. But the scene is played down, almost looking for the 'aw' factor instead of really going for it; if this was Sandler's he and the kid would have ended up in a scrap. Up For Love (terrible title, by the way) is better than that, it seems to say. Why then include a running joke where Dujardin must sneak into his mansion every night so not to awaken the frisky dog, which is like a small horse to him. It's caught in two minds: small jokes are funny but not always funny.

What saves Up For Love is Dujardin and Efira. What their respective subplots have to do with the story – he's got a hanger-on son (Cesar Domboy) and she has office chicanery to deal with – is unclear but they do help deepen their characters, giving them a more rounded feel. Dujardin, with his self-deprecating humour (used to mask the pain and humiliation he suffers on a daily basis) and warm smile proves to be a winning factor. The CGI is impressive too - if director Laurent Tirard (Moliere) doesn't fully embrace the out-and-out comic elements of the story, he does successfully slip in the snazzy special effects without drawing too much attention to them.