Characters make up for low-key 'Broken'

Parker Posey's neurotic, romantically challenged Nora Wilder is a spiritual return to her break-out "Party Girl" persona, a dozen years of single life later. Though prone to late-night clubbing, Nora is more settled and less impulsive -- almost cripplingly so -- and as her dips in the dating pool become more disastrous, she relies on cocktails to break down her inhibitions. It results in more one-night-stands than long-term relationships.

Nora has transformed her comfort zone of work, yoga and dinners in front of the TV into a kind of prison, afraid to step past boundaries of intimacy and commitment. A whirlwind weekend affair with dreamy French drop-in Julien (Melvil Poupaud) is so nerve-wracking that she suffers an anxiety attack. Is such spontaneity too much to handle, or does she simply realize how miserable her plodding, predictable life has become?

"Broken English" is the debut feature of Zoe Cassavetes, daughter of Gena Rowlands (who blesses the film in a small role as Posey's mother) and the late John Cassavetes, and her direction borrows something from her father's focus on character interactions.

There's not a lot of story here and the dialogue lacks the snap one usually gets in New York stories of affluent young adults, but the characters have an authenticity. Posey's scenes with Drea de Matteo (as her married best friend) have a lived-in quality that tells more than their words, and Cassavetes turns a spontaneous trip to Paris into a joyfully uninhibited series of little connections made on the street, in chance meetings, and over brief dinners and drinks with strangers.

Both admirably and frustratingly low-key, "Broken English" doesn't have a lot of answers. Cassavetes and Posey find Nora's journey in asking the right questions and, if only in emotional terms, the sense of possibility is affirming.