The Broken Hearts Gallery

The Broken Hearts Gallery
Starring Geraldine Viswanathan, Dacre Montgomery, Utkarsh Ambudkar, Molly Gordon
Directed by Natalie Krinsky

I am someone who personally love receiving things from friends - not expensive things, but things.  They make me reminisce on the good times, and bring back memories of the events where I got those things (simple things like a quarter, a masquerade mask, a movie ticket) and I remember those times fondly.  On the flip side, there's some people who collect things from events that led to heartbreak and tragedy, which also allows them to think about that person and maybe not in the best sense, but may also be a way to remember them forever.  "The Broken Hearts Gallery" looks at such a concept - a woman who keeps things from all her past relationships in hopes of fondly remembering them, but ultimately becomes a crutch in her own life.

Lucy (Geraldine Viswanathan) is a successful young woman living in New York City, working at a prestigious gallery in the hopes of opening her own, and dating her co-worker Max (Utkarsh Ambudkar).  She's on cloud nine until one night she looses both her job and her boyfriend, and drunkenly gets into a car belonging to Nick (Dacre Montgomery), thinking he's her Lyft, and proceeds to tell him the night's proceedings.  When she gets home she relies on her best friends and roommates Amanda (Molly Gordon) and Nadine (Philipa Soo) to help her pick up the pieces again, because her room is a literal shrine to all her former flames as she's kept something from every relationship (including Max's tie).  Her friends want her to get rid of the junk, but she can't give any of it up.

The next night she runs into Nick again, and the two strike up a friendship, with Nick showing her his vision - to open a boutique hotel.  She offers to help since she has no job, and comes up with an idea: a broken hearts gallery, using Max's tie as a starting point.  Soon she advertises on social media, and people from all over the city come to Nick's building to drop off their old trinkets of past relationships and share their stories, and Lucy and Nick begin to grow closer as friends.  With the official opening of Lucy's Broken Hearts Gallery fast approaching, past secrets threaten their relationship as they struggle with their own feelings.

"The Broken Hearts Gallery" is your typical romantic comedy that expertly plays every note with intrinsic intensity, providing your generic film experience that could've been seen on Lifetime or Hallmark.  Each beat can be seen a mile away, and the formula is followed perfectly - from the unlikely first meeting to the even more unlikely second meeting, to the slow bond growing and the eventual stumbling block, to the most obvious conclusion.  Most would think this formula is old and stale, and they'd be right - but there's something about this film that makes it totally endearing and enjoyable.

This "something" is the pitch-perfect casting of Geraldine Viswanathan and Dacre Montgomery, who star as Lucy and Nick.  Opposites attract, and there's no more opposites than these two characters - Lucy is a flighty, witty, talkative woman who sees the bright side of almost anything, while Nick is the more quiet, subdued, slightly pessimistic person who almost operates like a robot.  Seeing these two slowly open up to one another is surprisingly natural and believable, not something shoved in our faces for the sake of building a relationship, and that's due in strong part to the unbreakable chemistry between Viswanathan and Montgomery, and having both characters be totally worth rooting for.

The concept of the film itself is also a major selling point.  I wonder if such a gallery exists already, and it doesn't, it should.  Everyone has experienced heartbreak - be it from a destroyed romantic relationship, a friendship gone sour, or family turmoil - and we all carry trinkets from such events, but mostly in the mind.  Yet there's stuff left behind that's physical and tangible, and oftentimes we feel like we're the only ones feeling this hurt, but as Lucy says in the film, heartbreak is "the great equalizer."  It's something that affects us all, and the negative emotions of such an event leads us to believe that we're alone, and isolates us from society - but if we can bring this heartache to the open, we learn that we're not alone, and goes a long way to bring true healing to ourselves.  So the concept here is amazingly therapeutic and uniting, an idea wholly unique to the otherwise generic rom-com formula.

Offering a different spin on heartache, "The Broken Hearts Gallery" steps above its generic rom-com formula and delivers something enjoyable, especially due to the strong natural chemistry of the lead actors and the overall wholesomeness of it all.

The Score: A