Love Finds a Way in the Broken Hearts Gallery

How many of us have broken up with someone or had someone kick us to the emotional curb finding it ever so difficult to part with those cherished items days gone by?  Clearly, it’s not just me, because Director aka scribe Natalie Krinsky brings the whole scenario to life with The Broken Hearts Gallery.

“We all keep the mementos of our past relationships – the ones that left us better and the ones that broke our hearts but helped us grow,” says Selena Gomez, who executive produces the film. “It’s good to have an object to spur those bittersweet memories every now and then. Those memories are part of what makes us who we are.”

Lucy (Geraldine Viswanathan)is in love and the eternal optimist.  On the surface, she’s the ideal hip, young New Yorker working at a prestigious gallery and sleeping with the handsome gallery director, Max (Utkarsh Ambudkar). But when his ex shows up at a work event, a blindsided Lucy reveals the vulnerable mess lurking just below the surface.

A heartbroken Lucy finds herself unable to let go of her failed relationships, or kitchy momentos left behind a reminder or what was and what may have been.  With a loving shove into reality from her roommates Amanda (Molly Gordon) and Nadine (Phillipa Soo), Lucy and her literal baggage run into Nick (Dacre Montgomery) – an aspiring hotel owner who’s amused by Lucy’s antics and inadvertently inspires a solution: The Broken Hearts Gallery in the unfurnished lounge of his hotel. Along the way, they discover they have more in common than not while using art to tell stories about movement with people and places at any given moment in time.

At the end of the day Lucy and Nick come to a reckoning of who the hero is their love star and who is the villain. It’s so easy to make the person who breaks up with you into the villain.  It requires less pain, but pain is inevitable.  It’s what you do with it that matters.

Geraldine Viswanathan is literally a breath of fresh air.  Finally, we get to see a woman of color literally just be a human being.  NO stereotypical references to her culture or her circle of friends.  The tenderness of her pain and tendency to hold on dramaticized through the guise of her mother (now suffering from Alzheimers) provides the audience with the insight to the vitality, humor and free spirit that we witness in Lucy.  Viswanathan nails everything about her!

Mostly known for her heart wrenching Tony nominated performance in Hamilton, Phillipa Soo is fantabulous as Nadine.  Her scene with Lucy giving her advice on how to break up is pure comedy.

The Broken Hearts Gallery is fresh, fun, full of rapid fire dialogue and cheap laughs, but entertains and reminds us all that the thing that breaks you is the very thing that ultimately makes you whole.