‘THE BROKEN HEARTS GALLERY’ REVIEW: A BEGUILING ‘GIRLS’ LITE ROM-COM‘

Source: Variety

Lucy (Geraldine Viswanathan), the heroine of “The Broken Hearts Gallery,” is a soulfully flip 26-year-old New York art gallery assistant with a problem, or a fixation, or maybe we should call it a ruling passion. She’s so invested in her romantic relationships that each time one of them ends, she holds onto the mementos from it and treats the objects as if they were more important than the ex she broke up with. She’ll save old shoelaces, a thimble from a Monopoly game, or a pink rubber piggy bank: anything that reminds of her of the bittersweet times that were. Her Brooklyn bedroom looks like a bag lady’s knickknack museum. She’s a hoarder of lost-love nostalgia.

The movie knows this, and cracks a lot of jokes about it (the H-word is used), but it also believes in her obsession; Lucy’s over-the-top reverence for the totems of the past marks her as a romantic of three dimensions. Natalie Krinsky, who wrote and directed “The Broken Hearts Gallery,” is an unheralded filmmaker (this is her first feature), and she has a witty and spirited commercial voice. Watching the film, you know you’re seeing an unabashed spawn of “Girls” and “Sex and the City,” a kind of anthropological Williamsburg careerist rom-com set, in this case, in a woke wonderland of post-feminist awareness.