Broken English (***)

Parker Posey stars in this modest film that splits the difference between indie drama and traditional romantic comedy. She’s Nora, a single, mid-thirties-ish New Yorker who’s become bored with her job as a hotel event planner. Early on, we take a tour of her love life, including a blind date set up by her mother (Gena Rowlands). Writer-director Zoe Cassavetes eshews the obvious parade-of-horrible-dates montage featured in such films as Because I Said So. These dates merely don’t work out, in one fashion or another. Cassavetes, daughter of Rowlands and of the celebrated John Cassavetes, deftly stages the scenes so that, rather than satirizing Nora’s date with an actor, there’s a slightly detached quality that seems to gently mock his mild self-importance and her overeager desire to impress him. Eventually Nora meets a French guy who’s suitably dreamy without seeming generic. Does Nora need a man, or merely to become wiser and more self-content? The movie, again, strikes a compromise and ends when to proceed further would be trite. Neither Pretty Woman fantasy nor Unmarried Woman statement, the younger Cassavetes’s debut feature is neither earth-shattering nor iconoclastic like her dad’s movies, but consistently pleasant. Parker Posey seems to specialize in playing weird characters, even in her mainstream forays like Superman Returns, but here she does a nice job in a sort of normal role. She’s a little neurotic, but not quirky. Sopranos murder victim Drea de Matteo as Nora’s pal also mixes it up.

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