Jean Dujardin is Up for Love but we’re not

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      Starring Jean Dujardin. In French, with English subtitles. Rated PG

      Up for Love is a useless handle for this intermittently amusing farce about a seemingly mismatched twosome. A scene-by-scene remake by director Laurent Tirard (and another writer) of an Argentine flick called Corazón de León, this Franco-Belgian production was originally titled Un Homme á la Hauteur, reasonably translated as A Man of Stature.

      That last name suggests the central premise and most overworked joke here, with The Artist’s impressively resourceful Jean Dujardin playing a suave, successful architect in an unspecified French seaside town. Alexandre has only one social deficit: he’s less than four-and-a-half feet tall—a fact unknown to gorgeous, self-assured lawyer Diane (Belgium’s Virginie Efira), who meets him after being charmed on the phone. In person, she’s freaked out, but also smitten by his confidence.

      The director pulls many tricks to sell the size disparity, from green-screen effects to body doubles and lots of oversized furniture. Extra-tall César Domboy plays Alexandre’s almost-adult son, in warmly sincere scenes that don’t always fit with the funny business. It’s all quite cleverly done, but the main gimmick belies two essential weaknesses in the tale of Diane’s gradual acceptance of someone who doesn’t tower over her. The first is that there’s not enough material for even a modest 98 minutes, with dumb side characters, including Cédric Khan as Diane’s brutish ex, and Hollywood-style slapstick capers awkwardly padding the affair.

      The more irreducible problem is that the filmmakers went with a normal-sized actor and then laboriously scaled him down. The movie appears to be pleading for the acceptance of otherness—a privileged, wealthy version of otherness—but in the end, these dudes went with what they already knew. Still, this shouldn’t stop anyone from approaching Peter Dinklage for an English-language remake—maybe one with a little longer reach.

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