Man, it’s good to see Geraldine Viswanathan still at work in the U.S. I admittedly haven’t kept super-attentive with her recent filmography as I probably should be (gotta support Aussie talent, especially with the note she broke out on), but once this movie hit my radar, I found myself in a rare position of actually looking forward to a rom-com. With how often I poke fun at the genre and its many, many hallmarks, I’m guessing that my heart filed a restraining order against the rest of my body years ago.
Okay, easing up on the emo for a bit, Geraldine is fantastic in the lead here. She handles the NY motormouth dialogue brilliantly, her physical acting and reactions feel particularly natural, and she even retains that captivating force of personality from her turn as daughter of Cena in Blockers. Shame that Dacre Montgomery opposite her feels like such a wet blanket, letting down the Aussie side while Geraldine bowls him over in pretty much every scene they share together. Molly Gordon and Phillipa Soo as Geraldine’s besties have a lot of infectious charisma on-screen, Arturo Castro as Dacre’s bestie only further highlights Dacre’s miscasting here, and Bernadette Peters makes quite the impression as a very Miranda Priestly-esque gallery owner.
With how much I appraise cinema as art therapy, and knowing my internal baggage as far as past relationships, I oddly feel like the ideal audience for this kind of story. The titular Broken Hearts Gallery is the brainchild of Geraldine’s Lucy, an exhibit of mementos she and others have kept to remind them of past romances, and the narrative is peppered with in-character testimonials from the characters about their own items and why they kept them. It’s a fairly compelling idea, boosted by the overall mood of letting go of the past and not holding on to the pain of a break-up years after the fact (again, trying to hold back the one-man pity parade, but I can relate to that pretty damn hard), but it doesn’t get used for any particularly compelling ends within the story.
If I had to guess, I’d chalk up the film’s lesser aspects to this being writer/director Natalie Krinsky’s feature debut, being more familiar with TV work on shows like Gossip Girl and Grey’s Anatomy. It certainly explains how weird the pacing can be, to the point where I swear that there are two third-act break-ups in here, except the first one happens about halfway through. It’s a bit odd, and as much as I genuinely appreciate the one-liners here, it often has the unfortunate effect of leaving the titular premise in the backseat, as if there’s no real drive for the narrative beyond the rom-com dialogue between friends and prospective more-than-friends. The editing from Shawn Paper doesn’t help, with a few truly jarring cuts that only add to the lackadaisical tone that keeps poking through.
It basically amounts to the kind of film that needs a galvanising lead performance to hold everything together, which turns out to be an easy proposition because Geraldine Viswanathan is on her A-game here. She admittedly comes across as the only person here who is, both in front of and behind the camera, and the script ends up spending more time with odd bits of feminist sentiment than it does with the break-up sentiment behind the plot itself, but honestly, for those with a taste for rom-coms, I could easily see myself recommending this off the strength of Geraldine alone.
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