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gooddaykass · 9 months

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The Broken Hearts Gallery: a review

Before actually watching this movie, I absolutely didn’t, not in a thousand years, think that I would merely even enjoy it. I had my reasons, or rather excuses for the negative presumption, just like how I seem to have my excuses for everything else in life. The movie wasn’t famous, none of the actors were well known, the IMDB rating wasn’t looking too interesting, it seemed to be just another typical romcom, blah blah blah.

Then why did I want to watch the movie to begin with, you ask? Well, I have a habit that once an actor really impresses me, I’d watch their entire filmography. It seems obsessive at times and most of the time I would only find mediocre movies at best, in which the actor played a mediocre character, but there are still those very few times I’d find those mind-blowing films buried deep somewhere on the internet no one knows about but me and those moments keep me going.

This time, it was Dacre Montgomery. I, like many of us, was captured by his incredible performance as Billy Hargrove in Stranger Things. I found it very impressive how he was able to embody the tension, the venom, the violence that Billy always carried around, yet still beautifully humanised him and made the character resonate with the audience. The complexity, depth, and potential of this character need their own post, and that’s future-me’s problem.

As expected, I then watched through almost everything written in his filmography section on his Wikipedia page (in which I realised I had watched Power Rangers before and remember nothing about Dacre in that movie!) and eventually came The Broken Hearts Gallery. I will spare you the rant about how much I did not want to watch the movie in the beginning, but just this time, okay? 🙄

Well, I was painfully wrong. The movie was absolutely amazing. It has been a while since the last time I enjoyed a piece of romcom that much (though to be honest, romance isn’t exactly my thing).

summary

Essentially, the movie is about our girl, Lucy (Geraldine Viswanathan), and her journey of building her own gallery, getting over her ex(es), and gaining a new (boy)friend, Nick (Dacre Montgomery), along the way. Lucy is a girl filled with passion: she loves art and dreams of owning her own gallery one day. During a big event at the gallery she is working at, she catches her boyfriend, Max, cheating on her with his ex. Hurt and drunk, she makes quite a scene at the event, consequently getting herself fired.

After the event, she calls an Uber to get home but gets into Nick’s (the love interest) car instead, for that she mistakes him for her Uber driver, and he drives her home anyway since she refuses to get out of the car in her drunken-in-misery state of mind. Lucy then complains about the disastrous night with Nick on her way home. They meet the second time when she follows Max and his ex-turn-girlfriend into a restaurant and Nick pulls her out of it to prevent a scene from being made. The two of them get close while she is helping him with building his dream hotel in exchange for gallery space there at the hotel. Overall, the movie has a very light mood, things didn’t get too serious.

The movie is bright, lighthearted, funny, sweet. It is bright, not the blinding brightness at midday but rather the first spec of light at the crack of dawn from the window of your bedroom. To me, the movie feels like the giddy, happy feeling you get staying up all night talking to a close friend you haven’t seen in a while. You talk about everything in the world, from the crazy project you’ve been working on to the cute kid in class you’re having a crush on. You talk so long that when you look out the window, the sky’s already lighting up. The sun’s not up all the way, the sky is still in a deep shade of blue, but it’s slowly waking up, light spilling into your room.

what I love about the movie

Lucy herself is probably the best part of the movie. The list of reasons I have for loving her could go on and on but the biggest one has got to be because she has so much chemistry with everyone and everything. There is a scene where she was playing around with a sock hand puppet by herself and it’s way more interesting to watch than, like, 50 shades or something (shhh I know it’s a bad joke).

Another point I would love to add is that Lucy is very passionate. She has enough passion to fill the world’s void, probably. She loves art, she wants to open her own gallery, and that’s the goal she’s been actively working towards achieving for the past 8 years, maybe even her whole life. She sees art in everything, just like her mother, and even though she was fired from her job at the Woolf gallery, broken up with, and humiliated on the same night, she stands back up and in turn, turns her dream into reality (and arguably she helps quite a lot in making Nick’s dream come true as well).

Not only this but she really approaches everything in life with the same amount of passion. She sees a campaign collecting signatures and she stops to sign even though she was in a hurry, she sings with all her heart in karaoke (and also, does Dacre really suck that bad at singing or was he faking it?), she comes across an old sofa she loves and proceeds to carry it 40 blocks back to the Chloe Hotel on foot while wearing a stunning sundress. This woman is wonderful, a total blessing to all of us. Geraldine is such a talented actor and I hope to see her more in the future.

The special friendship Lucy’s trio has is absolutely amazing. Right from the get-go, we have an adorable scene of our friends group set 8 years before the main events of the movie. They were sorting through Lucy’s “cave of souvenirs” from old relationships. The three were already blooming with chemistry with their banters and snarky comments and I LOVE THEM because THEY’RE TOTALLY MY FRIENDSHIP GOAL!!

It’s so funny how despite being the best of friends, Nadine and Amanda are so different. It’s amazing how the snarky, sarcastic, lawyer-to-be Amanda with the weirdest taste in men ever and the loving, sensitive, fashionable stay-at-home model Nadine, whose list of girlfriends no one could ever keep track of, looked at each other and went, “Yep, that’s the one I’ll be attached at the hip with for the rest of my life” but I’ve got to say, great choice, the three of them. Lucy, Amanda, and Nadine’s energy fit together like pieces of Lego and they create such a piece of wild art. The foundation of their friendship must be very strong.

Despite their stark differences, they have an endless amount of unconditional support for each other. They might be unconventional, a bit crazy and otherworldly but the first thing these girls give each other is support and sympathy. You have an opinion? That’ll have to wait. Even when they give each other snarky comments, they know each other well enough to not get offended and to know that no harm is intended. I must say, from personal experience, this takes a very long time and a lot of understanding and trust to establish.

There’s this scene when Lucy tells her friends she and Max broke up and she was fired from her job, Nadine and Amanda instantly know what to do. They wrap her in a blanket, get her snacks and drinks, and sit next to her in a cuddle puddle. The scene is incredibly cute!! Literally friendship on another level. Top-tier besties.

The cool thing is, I think they know exactly how to care without crossing the line or trying to solve other people’s problems. For example, when Nick comes to their house to tell Lucy that he would stay away from the hotel on the night of the gallery opening due to the terrible fallout of the encounter with Chloe (his ex), Amanda and Nadine give him some (very comical) threats since he hurt Lucy’s feeling but they never try to actually stop Nick from seeing Lucy. I think they knew whatever was happening between the two of them, they needed to figure it out themselves. This detail is quite memorable to me because I realised I’m a bit too nosy for my own good sometimes (and I’m trying to work on it :D).

Lucy and Nick’s first encounter is nothing new in the world of romance. The trope generally goes like this: they accidentally run into each other after a bad day, one person (usually the female character) complains about her life to the other character and the other person (usually the male character) listens and adds comments here and there (though admittedly forcefully). I find this niche trope rather relatable for many reasons which deserve their own post but in this movie specifically, the scene is hilarious and adorable. Really though, I giggle throughout the entire movie because almost every scene is so lovely I want to die.

more details I love

I feel like Dacre’s American accent in this movie is kind of awkward 😆. He did great in Power Rangers and Stranger Things but then when he played Nick he was like, “Nick would be more funsies if his accent is a bit more artificial and Aussie than he’s supposed to be” and that’s adorable.

The shirt!

The gazillion weirdly relatable quotes

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things I don't like

Of course, the movie is not perfect, no matter how much I wish it was. I really hate the Chloe plot. The entirety of it. What happened was that Lucy saw Nick and Chloe, Nick’s ex girlfriend and also the one whose name was on the door, go together after they had pretty much established that they were a thing. She appeared for 1 minute in total but was already established as a bad person (I am trying to be polite, okay?).

Nick using her name to name the hotel was, I guess, understandable. People are not smart when they’re in love, but the miscommunication drama was unnecessary. The reason why Nick did not tell Lucy it was his ex’s name on the door was apparently because he “didn’t know when and how”? That was a terrible reason given that they spent all their time together building the hotel and preparing for the exhibition, probably before they even developed romantic feelings for each other. Besides, everyone hates the miscommunication trope.

Personally, I don’t think Nick and Lucy have ✨the spark✨. Like, you know, the ✨tension✨ people have with the one they find sexually/romantically attractive? The one that we all insist exists between the characters in the non-canon ships we love? Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. I don’t know if it’s just me but when I look at them and their interactions, I see two very close friends who love each other endearingly in a capital-P Platonic way. They ⭐sparkle⭐ because of the joy of purely being in each other’s presence, the same way Lucy, Nadine, and Amanda do when they’re together, not the ✨sparkle✨ that would lead to two naked people in one bed, which was what wound up happening in the movie.