Lucy visits Nick at the half-built, scrap-laden renovation site while carrying a trash bag of those souvenirs (long story) he suddenly pulls a tie-Max’s-out of the bag and hangs it on a piece of drywall, which Lucy is suddenly inspired to label the Broken Heart Gallery (singular). If exhaustion hasn’t set in from all that setup, know that Lucy has a long string of failed relationships, and her longtime way of mourning them is by keeping-or, as her roommates, Amanda (Molly Gordon) and Nadine (Phillipa Soo), say, hoarding-souvenirs of her exes. In chaos and panic, Lucy cute-meets Nick (Dacre Montgomery), who is trying to renovate-hands-on-an abandoned Y.M.C.A. At a company event, when he publicly dumps her for his ex, Amelia (Tattiawna Jones), a Francophile doctor, Lucy drinks too much, makes a scene in front of clients, and gets fired by the gallery owner and founder, Eva Woolf (who pronounces her first name with a short “e”-a spirited archness that’s played to the joyful hilt by Bernadette Peters). She’s also dating one of her bosses, Max (Utkarsh Ambudkar), the gallery’s thirty-five-year-old second-in-command. Viswanathan plays Lucy Gulliver, a twenty-six-year-old Brooklynite who aspires to found her own art gallery and, when the action starts, is working as a gallery assistant-but not for long. “The Broken Hearts Gallery” is a good bad movie, one that gathers peripheral pleasures around its hollow center and the Tinkertoy construction of the plot. In “The Broken Hearts Gallery”-Krinsky’s first feature-Viswanathan’s performance lends the movie its sole impression of vitality and spontaneity, to go with its one bright light of conceptual inspiration. She’s only in need of a project at the level of her artistry. That work is done by its lead actress, Geraldine Viswanathan, who shows, as she did in previous roles in “Blockers” and “Bad Education,” that she’s among the most talented performers of her generation. ![]() It is, unfortunately, a concept so high that it rarely touches the ground, and its theoretical ingenuity leaves plenty of empty dramatic space to be filled. ![]() At a time when romantic comedies are often enfeebled either by sentiment or cynicism, saccharine tones or absurd premises, a new one, “The Broken Hearts Gallery,” written and directed by Natalie Krinsky (and opening on Friday in some place called “theatres”), bridges the gap with a high concept.
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