The Broken Hearts Gallery

Typically rom-coms are fraught with predictability, with trite and banal storylines--most are a complete letdown, but, along with a small handful of other rom-coms, "The Broken Hearts Gallery" was actually better than I expected, mostly due to a somewhat interesting premise along with an effective chemistry between the two lead stars.

What if you saved a souvenir from every relationship you've ever been in? This story follows the always unique Lucy Gulliver (Geraldine Viswanathan), a 25-year-old art gallery assistant living in New York City, who also happens to be an emotional hoarder. After she gets dumped by her latest boyfriend, Max Vora (Utkarsh Ambudkar) due to his infidelity with one, Dr. Amelia Black (Tattiawna Jones), Lucy is ultimately inspired to create The Broken Heart Gallery, a pop-up space for the items love has left behind. She is also motivated after being fired from the art gallery she worked at owned by Eva Woolf (Bernadette Peters). Enters into her life but Nick (Dacre Montgomery), a construction worker attempting to renovate an old hotel with his best buddy Marcos (Arturo Castro), and as circumstances that happen, whether realized or not, Nick and Lucy meet and ultimately help each other on so many levels.

Others to round out the cast are Molly Gordon as Amanda, Phillipa Soo as Nadine, Suki Waterhouse as Chloe, Nathan Dales as Jeff and Sheila McCarthy as Cheryl Gulliver.

It was written and directed with relative graceful pacing by Natalie Krinsky (TV). Other than a healthy dose of TV experience, this filmmaker is virtually a newcomer to the feature film realm. The direction was truly spot on showing these young people in their everyday lives with all the pathos and emotions that come with that. Krinsky extracted just the correct amount of these emotions that made these characters come to life. The writing by Krinsky was definitely better than I ever expected. Other experience--this being TV, certainly served her with this film. Although the film was predictable and shared the usual format with other rom-coms, what made this more palatable was the premise--different than other rom-com premises--and the chemistry between Nick and Lucy. Even though I haven't heard of these two actors, they came across likeable, affable and truly strived to stick together no matter what the obstacles. Montgomery looks a lot like Zac Efron facially--he could be his brother it's so uncanny. 

After seeing so many banal, unoriginal and trite rom-coms in the past, this film certainly gave me a little more faith in this particular genre. Did it still need some work? Clearly, but I can definitely see Krinsky making more films considering this is her first feature film. I'm curios in what she'll attempt in the future. 

Out of 4 Stars: 2.5                                       Rated: PG-13                                       108mins.