THE BROKEN HEARTS GALLERY (12A) 109mins GALLERY assistant Lucy Gulliver is unlucky in love – and she isn’t having much luck in her job, either. Played by Aussie Geraldine Viswanathan, Lucy is cruelly dumped by her smarmy older boyfriend Max at a boozy opening-night party. In a scene reminiscent of Bridget Jones’s famous introduction of […]
GALLERY assistant Lucy Gulliver is unlucky in love – and she isn’t having much luck in her job, either.
Played by Aussie Geraldine Viswanathan, Lucy is cruelly dumped by her smarmy older boyfriend Max at a boozy opening-night party.
In a scene reminiscent of Bridget Jones’s famous introduction of Mr Fitzherbert as “Mr Tits-Pervert”, Lucy is then forced to take to the stage, which quickly leads to her being both boyfriendless and jobless.
Covered in heartache and mascara, she stumbles into what she thinks is an Uber, but is in fact the car of good guy and wannabe hotelier Nick (Dacre Montgomery), who drives her home anyway.
They then work together to open his dream hotel and her Broken Hearts Gallery — a place where strangers can leave tokens reminding them of their former heartache. The film is a joyous resurgence of a long-lost genre from the cinema — the classic, uncomplicated romcom.
The sort of movie where it goes: Just good friends, followed by more than friends, followed by pesky exes turning up to ruin it, and then, finally, a very public declaration of love wins out.
All with some montages and hilarious one-liners mixed in. And Viswanathan gives us a fast-talking, funny and feisty Lucy in this much-needed feelgood film.
She is so extroverted she brings introverts like me — who would choose a lifetime of muteness rather than sing a line of karaoke — out in hives.
But she still won me over.
Thanks to streaming services, films like this have been relegated to the small screen for far too long.
But writer-director Natalie Krinsky has now brought us the closest thing to a vaccine for these recent bleak times.
You have to be willing to accept that 26-year-old jobless Lucy and her two flatmates Nadine (Phillipa Soo) and Amanda (Molly Gordon) live in a Brooklyn apartment that would cost millions.
And that they have an endless collection of vintage outfits. But who cares when we finally have a movie that makes your mouth do that long-forgotten thing where the corners of it spontaneously rise up.
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