Broken English: An assured debut

Reviewer: Erin Donovan
Rating (out of 5): ****

Parker Posey's Nora in Broken English exists further down the continuum of roles she played in the nineties in films like Daytrippers, Clockwatchers, Party Girl and Kicking and Screaming: neurotic, sarcastic, and sort of unambitious. But in your thirties these things are no longer cute (or "quirky", as Posey is so often called) but sort of annoying and self-defeating. In the new Broken English, she's single among married friends, working at a barely above entry-level (but "cool") job in a stable of trust fund-insulated successful artists. She's in crisis and the people in her life think crappy blind dates will lead to fairy tale solutions. But by now she's become so accustomed to isolation and condescension that she no longer trusts her own instincts and has become her own worst enemy. She meets a similarly burnt but far less cynical French dreamboat (Melvil Poupaud of Time to Leave) and they have a weekend romance before he leaves for Paris.

The film then veers into dangerous territory for character-driven films in their third act. If a director does something familiar, they're re-treading; if they do something unusual they're accused of being precious, elitist, overly clever, stupid, or some combination of these things. But here the story takes us on a modest adventure and ends on a genuinely hopeful grace note for its characters without being overly sentimental.

Broken English is an exciting, assured writer/director debut from Zoe Cassavetes (daughter of filmmaker John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands, who appears in the film as Posey's mother). It premiered at this year's Sundance and is more film-literate than anything the festival has yielded in a post-Tarantino world. Parker Posey is at her best here; we learn the most about her character in the scenes where she's alone, getting ready to go out or aimlessly trying to "improve" herself. New York and Paris are filmed beautifully, in the ground's eye view one would get from walking around for a few days. And Josh Hamilton makes a small but delightful appearance as one of Nora's no-fault bad dates that also feels like an update of his character from Kicking and Screaming. Other appearances include (film director) Peter Bogdanovich, Drea de Matteo, Justin Theroux, and Tim Guinee.

There's also a much more sensational aspect to the film (so blatant that at times it feels voyeuristic): the audacious parallels between Nora's best friend's (de Matteo) marriage and that of Cassavetes's real life friend Sofia Coppola's marriage to Spike Jonze. No doubt there's some revenge being taken here for Michel Gondry's announcement to the world that Science of Sleep's ice queen lead female character was based on Coppola.

DVD extras include a making of featurette and deleted scenes.

See also: Kicking and Screaming, Before Sunrise/Before Sunset, The Ballad of Jack and Rose, Unbelievable Truth.