I Love Italian Everything

You remember what Raoul Bova said? That there aren’t parts in Italy for good looking guys like him? Yeah, it sounded a little egotistical at the time but after I saw “Il Truffa Cuori” ( The French movie, “L’arnacoeur ” or “Heartbreaker” in America) I started seeing his point.


There were a couple of non-Italian movies I wanted to see in Rome, this one and “The King’s Speech” (hadn’t gotten around to it at home and thought it might be interesting seeing it dubbed). The French one (and for the purpose of this entry we’ll call it “Il Truffa Cuori”) was getting a lot of attention in Italy and it played in America last year – so let’s compare this French comedy with Italian ones.


Il Truffa Cuori is the story of Alex, a good looking guy (Romain Duris) who makes a living breaking up relationships. If someone, for whatever reason, doesn’t think that a woman should be with a man, he and his team of professionals swoop in like the CIA – Alex’s role is to make her fall in love with him. It’s obviously a pretty successful business, but when the client is a rich guy who wants his beautiful daughter’s (Juliette, played Johnny Depp’s sweetie, Vanessa Paradis) impending wedding called off, guess what happens. Go ahead, guess.


Did you guess “they fall in love for real”? If you did, you’re like me and everyone else who sees this movie, you have the uncanny ability to see through predictable movie plots.


So why is this movie successful? One big reason – the actors are really, really good looking. And maybe Raoul Bova is right – Italy does not do enough like this. You would think that a country so obscenely full of beautiful men and women, like Italy, would have dozens of movies, all the time, starring beautiful actors and actresses. But they really don’t as much as they could.


Il Truffa Cuori has a lot of holes in it. For one thing, I really didn’t completely get why Juliette’s father didn’t want her to end up with the rich, handsome guy that she was set to marry. And another thing – why exactly was Alex such a great guy for her? I mean everything that she knew about him were lies – things that he’d learned about her to pretend that they had things in common. He studied Wham! and the movie “Dirty Dancing”, her favorites, so that they could have a big “Dirty Dancing” dancing moment. Was he going to spend the rest of his life singing, “Wake Me Up Before You Go-Go” in the car with her?


Doesn’t matter – they are pretty together and everyone wants them to fall in love throughout the whole movie.


Watch the trailer below (English subtitles), rent it from Netflix (Click here for the link) and see if you agree with me. Oh, it’s a very likable movie in a benign, Hollywood romantic movie kind of way – the thing it really has going for it is the good looking actors.