The agency of heartbreak (now on Netflix) is a German romantic comedy with a bit of drama, and that could save it from the scrap heap. Rosalie Thomass plays the owner of the thing of the title, who offers advice to people despondent over a breakup, and Laurence Rupp plays a sexist, shameless magazine columnist who writes about her business. These two characters are so desperately different that there is no way they could ever fall in love. Ever! So why bother watching this movie, really, since it’s obviously about opposites not attracting? Especially since it was released on Valentine’s Day? Well, there might be a half-decent reason, she admitted grudgingly.
THE AGENCY OF THE HEART: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The essence: “I’m just there for them.” That’s Maria’s (Thomass) goal. She runs The Heartbreak Agency, which offers “seminars, coaching and therapy” for people in love. She calls herself a “heartbreak therapist,” which sounds a little oily, but it could also just be a subgenre of the psychotherapy business. Karl (Rupp), however, doesn’t believe it. He believes she is “creating emotional needs, which she then solves.” Of course, he doesn’t believe in love. He never has, he never will. He sleeps with women, discards them like they’re gum wrappers, and struts around with the kind of smug look on his face that you just want to spray with bleach and ammonia and erase from this existence. This guy. That? ass.
Karl is a writer for Splash magazine, which still prints physical copies, so yes, that’s the first hint that this movie is set in a fantasy land. He walks into Heartbreak Agency with a grudge, interviews Maria, then sits down at her keyboard and puts together a nasty, sexist, very dense article in which he calls women “cowards.” “Because women can be cowards too,” he implores, degrading them for being obsessed with pronouns. He slips it to his editor, who was supposedly either in a coma for a while, or on vacation at McMurdo Station, and then gets fired. Have a good trip. And then Karl retires from journalism and lives a long, miserable life alone, the end. What a movie, huh?
No! In fact, The agency of heartbreak It’s one of those movies where voyeurs like Karl get a just comeuppance or are miraculously transformed into decent human beings, and I’m not going to say which one. No sir. But I will say that he can’t get any work and his editor gives him a second chance, and I almost spelled “editor” as “idiot,” so my subconscious judgment is bubbling a little here. Anyway, Karl has to undergo the full Heartbreak Agency treatment and write a fair and reasonable article about it, and then the idioeditor will return his work to him. This requires Karl to meet a group of lonely, depressed people and attend group therapy sessions, and maybe, just maybe, inject some zazz into this sad, depressed scenario, and possibly, just possibly, get to getting to know Maria as more than just someone who’s selling unrealistic romantic notions to vulnerable rednecks. Easy! Or is it easier said than done?
What movies will it remind you of?: There are so many rom-com tropes here. So many, so many. Sometimes it seems like a slight inversion of a premise we saw in How to lose a guy in 10 days – a premise that was more plausible in 2003, when being a magazine columnist was something a person could make a living doing.
Performance worth seeing: Without Thomass’s grounded and realistic characterization, The agency of heartbreak It would be much closer to blending in with any other generic romantic comedy on your Netflix menu.
Memorable dialogue: Karl makes a notable meta point: “All those romantic comedies are to blame, with their grand romantic gestures that make people swoon.”
Sex and skin: A little cuddling before and after intercourse, but nothing that will cause blood to rush to the extremities.
Our opinion: You know what would be so incredibly ironic? If Karl and María, opposites in every way imaginable, fell in love. How ANGRY would that be? Howling crazy, I say. But! Even if that happens, and I’m not saying it will happen, although you can predict the outcome of this quite easily, The agency of heartbreak he doesn’t quite succumb to the “grand romantic gestures that make people swoon.” It’s almost as if director Shirel Peleg, along with Thomass and, eventually, Rupp, are actively rebelling against the script’s standard romance. -com fodder, turning a hackneyed premise into something that almost seems plausible. Peleg minimizes the more extravagant elements of the plot and emphasizes the sweet and tender moments that our two protagonists share. The execution of the script slightly overshadows the annoying inventions.
So you can feel pretty good that you don’t dislike this movie. I know, faint praise. But the film lacks the overt effort of many others of its kind, which try very hard to make us laugh (I saw one of those the other day, a Polish flop dubbed Kill me if you dare). Although Heartbreak Agency has its ridiculous parts, Peleg leans into the lightly dramatic material just enough to make us believe that the human emotion on display is rooted in truth, especially the emotions that Thomass evokes with naturalistic ease. You might not believe Karl’s 180-degree personality change, which makes a pair of John Kerry flip-flops look like a slight twitch.
Tonally, Peleg somehow makes all of this work, especially when Karl and Maria find common ground in the midst of their ideological battle. Each has a viable point: she is kind and considerate, but her tense demeanor creates a harsh atmosphere for the patients in love with her. And she’s rude, but she correctly assumes that her patients could relax a little and find happiness in simple things, like having a few drinks around a campfire. The film isn’t bold enough to address thornier issues about Karl’s toxic masculinity, or how Maria walks the line between helping people and turning her suffering into profit. Is Maria’s agency a medical institution or just a pseudoscientific “welfare” hoax? Who knows, and The agency of heartbreak He’s not interested in that question, but at least he’s not making us sick by feeding us too many saccharine romantic comedy offerings.
Our call: The agency of heartbreak It doesn’t reinvent the wheel of romantic comedies, not in the slightest. But it’s barely good enough to transcend a trope or two, and that’s enough for me to gently (but not passionately, let’s face it) encourage you to PASS IT ON.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic living in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
