Broken English 2 1/2 stars
Parker Posey, Melvil Poupaud, Drea de Matteo, Gena Rowlands
Directed by Zoe Cassavetes
The children of actress Gena Rowlands and the late actor and filmmaker John Cassavetes have done pretty well for themselves in the family business: Nick Cassavetes worked steadily as an actor before heading behind the camera to helm glossy Hollywood productions (John Q, The Notebook); sister Xan Cassavetes directed the 2004 documentary Z Channel. And now Zoe Cassavetes is the writer and director behind Broken English, an intermittently engaging neurotic-New-Yorker-searches-for-love tale that recalls Woody Allen and his disciples, unfortunately most often unfavorably.
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Cassavetes’ biggest resource is star Posey, whose indie-queen reputation has slid a little with recent gigs like Superman Returns, Blade: Trinity and a guest stint on Boston Legal. Posey’s back in familiar form as Nora, a hotel guest-relations coordinator with horrible luck at dating. Her mom (Rowlands) tries to set her up, and her unhappily married best friend (de Matteo) encourages her to get out; instead she mostly sits at home and feels sorry for herself, worrying she’ll end up alone.
Then she impulsively attends a co-worker’s party, where she meets charming Frenchman Julian (Poupaud), and the two instantly hit it off. Nora’s neuroses, naturally, get in the way of the relationship progressing happily. They also become increasingly uninteresting, even as Posey gives her typical appealing, accessible performance. Part of the problem is that Nora is basically just a decade-later take on Posey’s defining role in 1995’s Party Girl, in which she portrayed a twentysomething New Yorker who longed for love and seemingly found it with a foreigner, only to have her neuroses get in the way.
Even though Nora feels a little overly familiar, she’s still interesting enough to watch for a while, but the film’s final act, which moves to Paris as Nora hunts down Julian while fretting over whether she actually wants to be with him, is boring and poorly paced, with side plots that end up nowhere. By the time Nora finally makes a decision about her romantic future, we’ve already moved on.