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BROKEN ENGLISH
Written & Directed by: Zoe Cassavetes.
Produced by: Jason Kliot, Joana Vicente & Andrew Fierberg.
Director of Photography: John Pirozzi.
Edited by: Andrew Weisblum.
Music by: Scratch Massive.
Country of Origin: USA. 93 min. Rated PG-13.
Released by: HDNet Films/Magnolia Pictures.
With: Parker Posey, Drea de Matteo, Melvil Poupaud, Justin Theroux, Josh Hamilton, Tim Guinee & Gena Rowlands.

The trailer for Broken English uses most of the film’s jokes to make it seem like a romantic comedy. But writer/director Zoe Cassavetes can’t quite commit to that breezy style any more than her central character, Nora Wilder (Parker Posey), can commit to a guy.

Is Nora a self-medicating depressive or is she depressed because of her disastrous albeit amusing “duty dates”? She pops pills and drinks, a lot, whether getting ready to put on a happy face for the fifth wedding anniversary party of her best friend, Audrey (Drea de Matteo minus her Sopranos accent), or commiserating with her on that marriage’s stifling boredom.

Nora’s kowtowing job as a director of special services at a chic hotel brings her into contact with petty, demanding celebrities. She even gives in to a handsome one for a date, Justin Theroux as a sleazy actor. After that short-lived relationship fizzles and is followed by another disappointment, she pushes herself to mingle at one more party, where there’s a souvenir from the host’s semester abroad, Julien, played by Melvil Poupaud, still scrawny from dying in Time to Leave, but attractively embodying almost every stereotype about French men in American movies (at least there’s no hygiene jokes).

He gets not only the usual romantic tour of Manhattan and its bathrooms, but also of a single thirty-something woman’s neuroses. Even if Cassavetes was inspired by her friend Sofia Coppola finding love in Paris to have Nora and Audrey search there too, the romantic climax strains even the thin credulity of the genre.

Several threads are left dangling undeveloped in the air, from the psychic in touch with Nora’s dead father to the French woman who thinks Nora’s her granddaughter. Then there’s Audrey’s barely resolved anger towards her nice, rich movie director husband. And the film’s title incongruously comes from the caustic Marianne Faithfull song covered over the closing credits by the DJ scoring team of Scratch Massive. However, this may be Posey’s most romantic film since she became the queen of the indies in Party Girl, a departure from her roles as a comic foil.

Ironically, Gena Rowlands, who plays Nora’s nagging mother and is Cassavetes’s real-life mother, can also be seen now in Paris, Je T’aime, where Natalie Portman goes through a similar but much more satisfying relationship in all of three minutes in Tom Tykwer’s “Faubourg Saint-Denis” segment. Otherwise, the 1990’s still seem to be the glory days when small films could find the romance in dating, from Cameron Crowe’s Singles to Nicole Holofcener’s Walking and Talking and Brad Anderson’s Next Stop Wonderland. Nora Lee Mandel
June 22, 2007