The Broken Hearts Gallery (2020)
Directed by Natalie Krinsky
Lucy is a young gallery assistant who collects mementos from her relationships. She discovers that she must let go of her past to move forward, and comes up with a lovely, artistic way to help herself and others who have suffered heartbreak.
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When Lucy enters the apartment and tells Nadine and Amanda she’s been dumped, they spring into choreographed comfort mode, draping a blanket around Lucy and giving her chips and dip and wine and a DVD copy of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.”
This debasing spectacle costs Lucy her job, and her relationship, and when she arrives home a mess, her roommates are quick to literally mobilize with bottles of wine and a copy of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” on DVD.
When Lucy arrives home broken up and miserable early on, Nadine, Amanda and Amanda’s inscrutable boyfriend Jeff (Nathan Dales) immediately fall into a well-worn, almost balletic routine where their bestie is quickly furnished with a blanket, chips, chocolate, wine and a DVD of Eternal Sunshine Of The Spotless Mind .
I noticed that one of the items they give her is a DVD copy of “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” which is one of the most romantic films I’ve ever watched.
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.
But the speedy wit in Natalie Krinsky's script hits you from the first moments, announcing a voice with the zippy specificity of Amy Heckerling ("Clueless") or Gillian Robespierre ("Obvious Child").