Broken English
"Broken English " is a conventional New York-lonely hearts story made watchable by one element and one element only: Parker Posey.
She plays Nora Wilder , a tightly-wound Manhattanite panicking as she sees her youth slipping away, and where any other actress would push the role's poor-me aspects, Posey doesn't know how to ask an audience for pity. She gives Nora's wallowing an ugly edge that's right and real and that the movie finally scampers away from in a panic of its own.
The writer-director is Zoe Cassavetes , the daughter of indie-film godhead John Cassavetes, making her feature film debut. Not to be cruel, but if Cassavetes Sr.'s movies were the raw beatnik prose of their day, "Broken English" is chick lit. Still, the film's a good summer read, with an honesty about romantic disenchantments in the big city that feels personally observed.
And, truth to tell, there are a lot of Nora Wilders out there: brittle, hip, well-educated (she's a Sarah Lawrence grad), and stalled in careers that call on 10 percent of their abilities. Nora's the guest-services manager for a posh downtown hotel, catering to the whims of rock stars and celebutantes. It's the sort of job that looks fun on paper, but it means she takes care of everyone's laundry but her own.
Nora's mother (Gena Rowlands , acting legend and the director's own mom) frets about her daughter's singleton status while step dad (Peter Bogdanovich ) offers useless advice. Best pal Audrey (Drea de Matteo , exchanging her "Sopranos" honk for a Manhattan trill) is in a stew over her own newlywed problems. Nora has dates and flings, but they're disasters that start well at Film Forum revival screenings and go downhill from there.
The sharpest moments in "Broken English" concern a preening movie star who holes up at the hotel and woos her out of boredom and insecurity. Seducing smart women is what he does for acting practice, and Justin Theroux ("Mulholland Dr., " "Six Feet Under ") plays him with a dim-bulb sincerity (and a hideous Mohawk) that works its charm on both Nora and us.
These scenes feel like "Sex in the City " with a morning-after pall, and they take up the movie's first half. Then, out of nowhere (a party, actually), appears Julien (Melvil Poupaud ). He's adorable, thin, younger. He's French. And he worships Nora without reserve, so much so that she has to pinch herself.
The movie should have done the same. The back half of "Broken English" is cute but spineless, as Nora wrestles with the question of whether she should open her heart and commit to Julien. Since he's the perfect man (and since Poupaud plays him with scruffy, caring charm), her dithering quickly gets on your nerves.
How much more interesting if the film had addressed the notion of compromise, of whether accepting an imperfect someone is better than holding out for an ideal no one. Instead, "Broken English" sends Nora to Paris -- or to movie-Paris, which is even better than the real thing -- and pretends to find answers in the baguettes and the boulevards. And maybe they're there, if you can afford the airfares.
Posey almost gets you to believe this women's-magazine nonsense. Nearing 40, she's deepening her range now, finding new strains of narcissism and vulnerability to offset the arrogance of her youth. She really is starting to look like the Katharine Hepburn of her generation, with the crucial difference that Hepburn worked in mainstream movies because that's all there was.
By contrast, modern Hollywood is happy to shunt Posey into indie films where her angles and ironies can't hurt the masses. She's the movie star who might have been, and she still might be if anyone in the industry had the nerve.
Ty Burr can be reached at tburr@globe.com. For more on movies, go to boston.com/ae/ movies/blog.
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