'Broken English' speaks of love in nuances

(B) Writer-director Zoe Cassavetes, the daughter of Gena Rowlands and the late actor-director John Cassavetes, has made a distinctive romantic comedy-drama called Broken English. If it lasts a month at the Charles, fans of the theater's film noir series should plan to make it a double-bill with In a Lonely Place (playing Aug. 18, 20 and 23), the 1950 romantic mystery that Cassavetes' heroine, Nora (Parker Posey), sees with a date at a Manhattan revival house. In that cult classic, Bogey plays a tormented, possibly homicidal screenwriter who tells the woman who's just fallen in love with him, "A good love scene should be about something else besides love. For instance, this one. Me fixing grapefruit. You sitting over there, dopey, half-asleep. Anyone looking at us could tell we're in love."

In Broken English, Zoe Cassavetes has learned Bogey's lesson: She treats cliches as fodder for comedy and nuances as the mainstays of a deeper, more beguiling sexual humor. What's engaging about this movie is that all the conventional trysts become low-key nightmare farces, including the scene when the heroine and a blind date go to In a Lonely Place. And the most genuine amorous sequence involves Nora's waking up from a half-drunken sleep to a sympatico Frenchman named Julien (Melvil Poupaud) - a man she met at a party the night before; a man she didn't remember staying over at her place - sipping coffee from her own kitchen and gently offering to brew her some. Before long, Nora is listing her phobias over brunch. The actors are so good at conveying Julien's gentle insistence that he means only the best for her - and Nora's grudging belief in his good faith - that anyone looking at them can tell they're in love.

A befuddled thirtysomething, Nora Wilder is a Sarah Lawrence-educated New Yorker who always thought she'd work in the arts. Instead, she has become the special-services administrator at a boutique hotel, catering to VIP demands for choice restaurants or rooms. She set up her best friend, Audrey (Drea de Matteo) with another friend, an eminently sociable film director, rousing the discontent of her own mother (Gena Rowlands), who thinks Nora should have married him. "The good ones get snapped up so quickly at your age," she tells her daughter helpfully.

Nora's problem, though, isn't that her mother sees her as terminally adrift: it's that Nora has begun to feel that way, too. "I think I must be doing something horribly wrong, but I don't know what it is," Nora says, after falling into bed with an actor (Justin Theroux) who does a clever Hollywood job of saying he's sick of showbiz.

One thing Nora does wrong is drink too much on dates. But she's a nice drunk. In fact, niceness may be her underlying problem. She says she was a healthy dater in college. But instead of progressing from hopeful school-girlhood, she's become detached from her own primal impulses. She hasn't become a steward of her own womanly desires. So when a good thing knocks on her door, in the form of Julien, that magnetic and surprisingly empathic Frenchman, she nearly ruins the magic by wondering whether what they have "means something."

Cassavetes evokes tender laughter from Nora's stumbles and rooting interest that she will ultimately right herself. This fledgling feature moviemaker has already mastered mixed emotions and atmospheres. There's a touching strand of dialogue and incident about Nora's love for her late father. (John Cassavetes died in 1989.) With the help of such gifted performers as her mom and Peter Bogdanovich (as the second husband of Nora's mom), Cassavetes creates the sort of cultured, cozy New York world that it's too easy to sink into - and keep sinking into. She is also skillful at conveying the forced, prickly politesse and faux intimacy that is the downside of office camaraderie. And, in a climactic Parisian interlude, she conjures a real vacation filled with psychic cleansing and emotional possibility.

Her feeling for performers gives the movie its tang. Posey has been a skillful comedian, especially in several Christopher Guest films, but as Nora she's wonderful at embodying a woman who is in the scary-funny position of no longer trusting her instincts. Her enactment of an anxiety attack is harrowing; the ruefulness that follows it pulls you into her warmth and substance. By the end, you feel she's repairing her broken body English as well as her broken heart. And Poupaud matches her move-for-move as a man who comes on strong and must learn to be himself when he's calm. The movie needs more incident and complication; it's modest to a fault. But the director and her actors make Nora and Julien's three-day-stand persuasive. You can tell that Julien feels the way Bogey did in In a Lonely Place: "I was born when she kissed me. I died when she left me. I lived a few weeks while she loved me."

>>>Broken English (Magnolia Pictures) Starring Parker Posey, Drea de Matteo, Justin Theroux, Melvil Poupaud, Gena Rowlands. Rated PG-13. Time 97 minutes.

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