With echoes of everything from Bridget Jones’ Diary to Sex and the City with a dash of When Harry Met Sally and a sprinkle of Girls , The Broken Hearts Gallery is Krinsky’s charming ode to the romantic comedy headed by a complicated female protagonist looking for love in all the wrong places.
“Broken Hearts Gallery” doesn’t employ the conceit of a “Wizard of Oz”-like dream sequence a la “Isn’t It Romantic,” but it embraces just as many rom-com staples in equally self-aware fashion, inviting us to leave plausibility at the door and enjoy unabashedly sentimental, escapist comfort viewing from first-time writer-director Natalie Krinsky, who displays a fine ear for witty dialogue, with the characters often sounding as if they’re in a next-generation reboot of “Sex and the City.”
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.
Defying assumptions that rom-coms can't compete against big-screen spectacles for getting ticket buyers out of lockdown and into the multiplex, the studio is counting on a largely-female audience, looking for a millennial "Sex and the City," to come out and support a small but sweetly personal film.