I regret to inform you that The Heartbreak Agency (2024) has good intentions, but largely can’t sustain the momentum needed to bring its idea to fruition. It’s a slog to churn your way through, and it’s got some problematic pieces that really gum up the works even further. (That’s an understatement.) However, I’m not entirely sure the subtitles are thoroughly and smoothly translated, so maybe it would have been slightly better if I understood German? I’m not convinced, but I am willing to give it the benefit of the doubt.
Since grieving her own bad breakup, Maria (Rosalie Thomass) feels a lot of empathy towards other people who are going through the same thing. After a few months of supported moping, she felt her friends reached a point where they no longer wanted to be saddled with her still raw feelings of lovelorn woe, which left her feeling lonely and cast adrift. So, as a therapist, she works to be there for her heartbroken patients in a way that no one was for her as they go through the stages of grief. She has also written some books on the subject and has some branded merchandise. A whole package deal.
When Karl’s (Laurence Rupp) girlfriend dumps him flat, he is at first confused. In his eyes, the relationship, which was mostly about eating breakfast and having sex, was going great. But then she cites how her heartbreak therapist said he was likely incapable of love, and Karl is incensed. So he does what any level-headed person would do and uses subterfuge and sneakiness to get close to Maria. He convinces his magazine editor to let him write an article about Maria and her work. It goes as horribly as you might expect. Or possibly worse since I certainly wasn’t expecting him to crack a joke comparing the life-size promotional cardboard cutout of herself holding her latest book to Kim Jong-Un. Anyway, despots and dubious jokes aside, he grills her about how she can possibly assess people that she’s never met—obviously he’s talking about himself, but she doesn’t realize, and it’s all highly unprofessional on his part. The two of them do have a gentle kind of give and take in their scenes together that makes their awkward journey from uncomfortable acquaintances (but not quite enemies) to friends and then lovers feel believable and touching. It’s just a shame more of the movie didn’t hold up enough to support it.
Karl goes off and writes a horribly misogynistic hit piece about Maria and her work, which he publishes without his editor’s approval, expecting nothing but pats on the back and bro-accolades. He is mystified, confused, and angry when the general consensus is that what he has written is dated, mean, sexist schlock that should be burned on the pyre with the rest of the patriarchy. One of the lines that Karl seems particularly proud of reads: “This is the condition of 21st-century women. Boundlessly self-actualized in their personal lives, they clamor in a shrill voice about a lack of CEO positions and the lack of gendered nouns. But no sooner does one of the men they’ve happily thrown by the wayside dare to go there willingly, then bam! The modern-day matriarchal snowflake snaps back into the shell of typical female behavior.” (I can only imagine the fun the screenwriters had challenging themselves to write the most outrageously sexist prose possible.) And then he gets fired for his sins. Maria, on the other hand, handles the article with great grace, explaining to him that she didn’t realize that his ex-girlfriend had been one of her clients, and offering him her services, which he politely declines. I kid! He’s an asshole about it. Eventually, realizing that absolutely nowhere is going to hire a washed-up journalist who just wrote a screed against a woman trying to help the lovelorn, Karl goes crawling back to his editor, begging for his job back. Now, of course the editor agrees with the stipulations that Karl rewrite the article and go to therapy with Maria for realz. This seems, erm, less than likely, but I’m absolutely willing to let it go for the fantasy of the movie.
Karl joins a support group for the brokenhearted where he immediately begins to undermine Maria’s work and sow chaos among the patients. The other therapy patients are less developed, so while they appear to be interesting people, we never really get to understand what makes them tick to know their backstories. It’s a disappointment, since so often in movies like this one it’s quirky background characters that can make or break the whole experience. These characters are largely just sounding boards against which Karl and Maria can bounce ideas and turns of phrase. Their flatness makes the plot feel convoluted and often boring. The therapy sessions drag with lots of sound bytes that hang in the air like a hazy summer fog.
Things progress further when the group goes away to a heartbreak retreat together for several days of intensive therapy. Karl, of course, immediately gets everyone drunk and doles out advice that’s largely contrary to Maria’s. He tells her that he doesn’t think there’s any great secret to giving out this kind of advice, and other kinds of cocky bullshit, and she gently puts him in his place. They spar about the merits of casual sex, Han Solo, commitment, and penguins. It’s a gentle kind of back and forth that mostly works, but it sometimes feels a bit wobbly and like it’s going off track.
One morning, Karl stumbles across Maria sitting on the beach smoking a joint, which they end up sharing as they talk about romance. It turns out that while she has her head together with work, she’s a cynic in her personal life when it comes to romantic love. She got dumped by her daughter’s father so he could go off and change the world, and now she’s content to work and raise their daughter. They commiserate about how one great romantic love is often an untenable ideal “made up to sell cards and flowers.” They share their distaste for romantic comedies with their “big romantic gestures that make people swoon. And the sappy love songs,” which give people unrealistic expectations. And they both agree that sunsets are highly overrated (both in rom-coms and in real life.). Oooh, how very meta to have a rom-com talking about the power of rom-coms while employing those selfsame tropes.
Then Karl’s ill-given advice causes Turgay (Özgür Karadeniz), one of the other therapy participants, to try to crash his ex-fiancées wedding, which just so happens to be taking place nearby, and Maria and Karl must team up to try to stop him. They make it to the church in time, but one thing leads to another, a woman’s large hat catches on fire, the sprinklers go off, Turgay makes his proclamation, and Maria and Karl are hauled off to the police stations where his mother eventually shows up to pick them.
Phew. Do you feel that bumping? That’s this movie going off the rails a bit. Please keep your seatbelts fastened and personal belongings stowed, because it’s not over yet. (Is that mixing metaphors? Does it matter?) The pair end up spending the night at Karl’s mother’s house, sleeping in his old bedroom, naturally. He’s sleeping on the floor and she’s in his bed, so it’s all very platonic, but then the bed breaks and she ends up on the floor next to him. He assures her it’s totally fine because he’s not attracted to her and she says she’s not attracted to him. They lie next to each other, first on their backs, faces pointed toward the ceiling, and then on their sides, facing each other, mere inches of soft light separating their noses, their cheeks, and their lips. They open up to each other more, with her telling him about how her daughter’s father left because he’s a climate scientist and he decided it was for the greater good for him to go do conservation work around the globe. Then Karl says, “I know saving the Earth is a very important cause…but if it meant I couldn’t be with you, then I’d let it all burn down.” Damn! Friends, this is all an important lesson in how you can light a fire in the wilderness using words alone. You can see the sparks leaping off that sentence. Phew. But it still felt a little like whiplash as they went from casually chatting, to him saying he’d let the world burn for her, to them ripping off their…Oh, you know what? Now that I hear myself saying it out loud it doesn’t seem like that great a leap after all.
However, can we talk about the elephant that has just been sitting over in the corner with its ankles politely crossed, reading an out-dated copy of People while it waits its turn? SHE IS HIS THERAPIST. HIS. THERAPIST. This is where I really hope the subtitles failed me and maybe there was some caveat where he’s not actually a patient, but just a reporter embedded with the patients, which I still don’t think would make them sleeping together particularly ethical since he’s still part of the therapy sessions, but would at least make it less unethical. Maybe? As it stands, it’s just wildly weird to try to pass this off like it’s fun and flirty and totally fine. I want to tell you about the rest of movie, about Karl bonding with Maria’s daughter, about Karl finally finding a more modern (if somewhat hackneyed) voice, about the misunderstandings that drive the pair apart, about what ultimately brings them back together, about the odd, possibly retrograde, choice the screenwriters made with regard to a minor character, but I have such a hard time seeing around that elephant that keeps trumpeting HE’S SCHTUPPING HIS THERAPIST! SHE’S BOINKING HER PATIENT! in my face.
Overall Rating on the Chronically Streaming Pain Scale:
Chronically Streaming 