Stream It Or Skip It: ‘How To Deal With A Heartbreak’ on Netflix, A Charming Peruvian Comedy About A Struggling Writer Whose Life Is In Shambles

In the Peruvian film How To Deal With A Heartbreak, streaming now on Netflix, a 34-year-old writer named Maria Fé has to try and find creative inspiration for her next book while dealing with a life tragedy. Full of charming performances and funny jokes, the film makes meta references to romantic comedies throughout, thought is not necessarily a rom-com itself. Though there are elements of romance, more than anything the film is a loving ode to family, parents in particular, and how they shape us.

HOW TO DEAL WITH A HEARTBREAK: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?

Opening Shot: The camera rolls through the interior of a Peruvian nightclub. A voiceover says, “My dear girlbosses, after making it through the pandemic, a global financial crisis, and especially the return of low-rise jeans, I think it’s safe to say nothing can take us down. “

The Gist: Maria Fé (Gisela Ponce de Leon) is a 30-something woman who has been riding out the pandemic living in her parents’ home in a Peruvian suburb. Her parents, Fernando (Salvador del Solar) and Elena (Norma Martinez), love her but wish she would get back to her stalled career as an author instead of being a Tik Tok influencer, which has been paying the bills lately. (The one great thing about living at home though, is that her charming dad has been co-starring with her in her videos. The two of them are peas in a pod, while her mother is the one pressuring Maria to be more serious about her career.)

Maria Fé realizes she’s in a creative rut, so she moves back to Lima where her pre-Covid life was, and where her two best friends, Caro and Tali, live. She loves her friends, but it’s hard being around them because Caro’s bakery business is thriving and Tali is newly engaged and compared to them, Maria feels like her life’s going nowhere. Soon after she returns to Lima though, she receives devastating news that her beloved father has died.

Maria Fé’s mother not only insists that she return to Lima after the funeral, but she signs her up for an online writing seminar to help inspire Maria’s creativity. (This film is the sequel to How To Get Over A Breakup, which followed Maria Fé as she found her passion for writing after a breakup, eventually publishing a Carrie Bradshaw-style book on dating. Here, she is working against a deadline to write that book’s follow-up and hasn’t written a thing.) As she tries to find her creative spark, she thinks that reconnecting with an old crush named Luca might help, and it does for a little while: the two hook up (in her mind, having sex will help inspire the content she’s writing about) but at the same time, she develops a friendship with a man in her seminar named Joaquín who she spends time chatting and flirting with via text.

The whole time though, it turns out Maria Fé has been looking for inspiration in all the wrong places. Rather than trying to find love, what she realizes she has to do is face her fear, and her grief. The loss of her father has loomed large throughout the movie, but she never addresses it, until she finally does. Sure, the ending is all very tidy and everything falls into place, but it’s refreshing that here, the happy ending doesn’t exclusively come from Maria’s love life sorting itself out, her personal and professional growth is what she’s really been working toward.

What Shows Will It Remind You Of? While the obvious comparison here is to Sex and the City, with a main character who is a writer of relationships, supported by a witty group of friends, there’s also an aspect of Apple TV+’s Shrinking, in which Jason Segel’s character struggles to find a purpose while dealing with grief over his wife’s death. Both this film and Shrinking use humor as a coping mechanism for more serious matters in the lives of our main characters.

Our Take: The heartbreak in the title of the film is not a reference to a breakup, but about the loss of a parent, and the journey that Maria Fé has to travel is one filled with true grief and mourning, and pouring her pain into her work. While the film has the hallmarks of a rom-com in so many ways, from a funny and quirky supporting cast, a story arc where the hot guy turns out to be a cad, while the friendzone guy turns out to be Mr. Right, the film does not spend the majority of its time playing up Maria Fé’s love life as much as it dwells on the life crisis she’s in the midst of (somewhere in between quarter-life and mid-life), as she realizes she’s not doing her best work. (I have to admit that as a freelance writer, when Maria discusses being hesitant to call herself a real writer, it resonated. After all, there are writers, like Margaret Atwood, who Maria name-checks in the film as an aspiration, and there are “writers,” people with blogs and newsletters who are filled with fear that they’re imposters.)

Maria is haunted – in a friendly way – by the ghost of her father throughout the film. He shows up after she’s had sex with Luca, and to check on her writing progress, always supporting her choices, just as he did in life. To see the visions of him is to find comfort and not have to face the fact that he’s really gone. Eventually, Maria realizes that she has to face her grief though in order to properly mourn him, and to finish writing her book. While it’s obvious that Maria needs to tone down the self-deprecation and get introspective at some point, she’s hesitant and afraid to make that leap, and the movie feels pretty accurate in portraying the way grief can bring our lives to a standstill one minute, and then become an inspiration the next.

Sex and Skin: There’s some onscreen making out that leads to offscreen sex, but that’s it.

Parting Shot: Early in the film, when Maria Fé tells her parents she’s writing a second book, she tells her father she plans to dedicate it to him. As the film closes and Maria is promoting the book, which wasn’t easy for her to write, she reads the dedication in a voiceover. “To dad. This is dedicated to you. This book exists because of you,” she says, ending her dedication with the line, “I don’t think I’ll ever stop missing you.”

Performance Worth Watching: Everyone in the film is well-cast, but Jely Reátegui who plays Caro, Maria’s crystal-loving, quirky, funny best friend, excels in that supporting role.

Memorable Dialogue: At one point, Maria Fé decides that her writer’s block is due to the fact that she hasn’t had sex in a while. “I’m three presidents into a dry spell!” she declares, to which her friend Caro replies, “In your defense, that’s a week here.” (Peru has had six presidents since 2016. It’s a solid joke once you Google “Peru How Many Presidents?”)

Our Call: STREAM IT! Many of Netflix’s international films are hidden gems, and How To Deal With A Heartbreak is one of them.

Liz Kocan is a pop culture writer living in Massachusetts. Her biggest claim to fame is the time she won on the game show Chain Reaction.