9/10/2023 0 Comments Gallery of broken hearts![]() ![]() With no job and no income, after three weeks of slothing about depressed and a day of acquaintance with Nick’s hotel, Lucy volunteers to work for him-for free-in exchange for developing the Broken Heart Gallery there. Instead, her performance has to generate the movie’s semblance of action. The script is more or less completely inside out-most of the actions and relationship moments that the story evokes are kept rigorously off-screen, in the interest of fabricating suspense, reveals, or fantasy. Viswanathan never rests, because the movie won’t let her. (It would be good to see more of the empathetic, therapeutic element to the gallery, when Lucy video-records the donors to the museum telling the tales of heartbreak that are behind the objects that they contribute, like Lucy, of “Peanuts,” with the five-cent psychiatrist’s booth.) Whenever the substance of the gallery, and of Lucy’s devotion to it, comes to the fore, the movie comes to life but those moments are all too brief, and the movie all too jumpy for its substance to be developed. ![]() Given the project’s genesis from the spontaneous collaboration of Lucy and Nick, their couple-hood is in the cards from the start-yet getting them together takes more than an hour of machinations, a tedious obstacle course that includes winks and nods at serious life consequences, but resolves them with what might as well be a wave of the magic wand (usually off-screen). The next day, she has another inspiration: she photographs it and puts the picture up on social media, it goes viral, attracts other souvenir donors (as well as some financial donors), and puts Lucy nearly instantly on the art-world map (complete with a two-page spread in New York). 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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