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The Breaker Upperers (2019; Directed by Madeleine Sami & Jackie van Beek)

Jen (Jackie van Beek) and Mel (Madeleine Sami) are friends and business partners in Auckland, New Zealand. Befriending each other after the same philandering young man (Cohen Holloway) cheated on each of them back in their twenties, Jen and Mel parlayed their common romantic wounds into a service they call “The Breaker Upperers”. In their professional capacity, Jen and Mel are paid by clients to render aid in breaking up with their significant others. This aid is often manifested in an unorthodox and absurdist manner, through door-to-door singing telegrams delivering the breaking-off message, by posing as trysting adulterers staged in flagrante delicto with breakup-desiring customers to be discovered by their partners, even by impersonating police officers notifying distraught husbands and wives that their other halves are missing, or even dead.

Although Jen in particular justifies the obvious moral and ethical dilemmas of such a line of work by telling herself and others that the Breaker Upperers are doing good by extricating people from unhappy relationships, those dilemmas begin to bother Mel. The service, and indeed the entire friendship between Jen and Mel, is at least to some extent a disavowed transference of a whole host of emotional issues arising from the women’s mutual pain and resentment at their treatment at the hands of the heartbreaker Joe (and of their treatment of each other) years before. For Jen especially, who has shut out meaningful attachments and taken refuge in misanthropy after her much deeper hurt at Joe’s betrayal, running the Breaker Upperers is a way of very actively not dealing with lingering emotional baggage, or of repeatedly pummeling it into submission by inflicting similar baggage on others (for a modest fee, of course).

Mel remains more open and active in dating and sex, however. She was one of Joe’s flings, not the more established and permanent cheated-upon party like Jen was, after all. Therefore, she experiences some doubts about what they are doing as well as a growing tension with Jen, particularly when she befriends a lonely female victim of their efforts named Anna (Celia Pacquola) and becomes infatuated with a handsome dimbulb of a Maori rugby player named Jordan (James Rolleston), who seeks the Breaker Upperers’ help in breaking up with his intimidating cornrowed girlfriend Sepa (Ana Scotney).

The Breaker Upperers is executive-produced by the prolific current maven of Kiwi comedy, Taika Waititi, and it displays his trademarked tone of awkward/absurdist hilarity underlied by a persistent grey lining of sadness and pathos. It’s likewise chock-a-block with his prior collaborators from the small but surprisingly talent-deep New Zealand entertainment scene: the flinty and wonderful van Beek had a supporting role in the cult vampire mockumentary What We Do in the Shadows, Rolleston was the young lead in Waititi’s dramedy Boy, and supporting players from Shadows, Hunt for the Wilderpeople, Thor: Ragnarok, Eagle vs. Shark and NZ TV comedy Wellington Paranormal pop up as well (Waititi fave Holloway, Rima Te Wiata as Jen’s wealthy mother, Oscar Kightley in a cameo as a client, Karen O’Leary as a lesbian cop, even Jemaine Clement as a lover of Jen’s). It does, however, redress the generally male-centric perspective that dominates Waititi’s movies, with van Beek and Sami’s female gaze forging a feminine trajectory to similar places of humour and pathos.

There are numerous highlights in this very funny movie. Rolleston’s Jordan is uproarious whenever he opens his mouth, especially when haplessly hijacking Mel’s attempt to engineer the split from Sepa with an elaborate story (“She’s pregnant. It’s twins. We did IVF because her eggs are old.”) and simultaneously accepting an award from his rugby league club while announcing that Mel is actually pregnant by him (“As my mother told me, ‘You fucked up this time, and I’m not paying for any of it'”). Scotney is absolute dynamite as Sepa, who has her cartoonish crew behind her at all times, including at her teller job and when choreographing a dance routine to K-Ci & JoJo’s “All My Life” in order to win Jordan back (“This is our song,” he says as it begins, enraptured and terrified in equal measure).

The Breaker Upperers mines 1990s pop romantic ballads to great effect, also utilizing Celine Dion’s overwrought and histrionic “It’s All Coming Back to Me Now” (van Beek and Sami are Celine superfans and started a grassroots viral campaign online to convince Dion to see the film on a recent Australian tour, with happy results) in a nostalgic flashback montage of Jen and Mel’s past liaisons with Joe that transitions to and from a karaoke-bus rendition of the song by Mel (Sami, a musician who is in a band with her two sisters, displays her impressive vocal talents in this sequence, as well as more comedically in the country-music porch telegram featured in the below trailer). As hugely funny as it is, The Breaker Upperers is also surprisingly thoughtful and layered in its consideration of the emotional attachments of relationships and the psychological and personal after-effects that result when those attachments are broken.