Up for Love

French director Laurent Tirard was drawn to remaking the 2014 Argentine comedy Corazón de León because he had felt physically diminished after surviving a potentially fatal illness and people kept commenting on his drastic weight loss. He casts Jean Dujardin as a successful architect who has to cope with the fact that people don't take him seriously because he is only 4ft 5in tall. Lawyer Virginie Efira struggles to equate the charmer who found her lost phone with the man who is 16 inches shorter than herself (without heels). But, this being a romantic comedy, love finds a way. The leads are charming, although there's no spark between them, perhaps because of the amount of (not entirely convincing) green-screen work. Stéphanie Papanian amuses as the secretary Efira shares with boorish ex-husband Cédric Kahn, but a subplot involving Efira's snooty mother (Manöelle Gaillard) and her deaf stepfather (Bruno Gomila) feels contrived. Tirard never hits the right balance between slapstick, sentiment and social satire.