BROKEN ENGLISH (2007) ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Zoe Cassavetes
Parker Posey, Drea de Matteo, Melvil Poupaud,
Justin Theroux, Tim Guinee, Gena Rowlands,
Peter Bogdanovich, Roy Thinnes, Josh Hamilton
To buy into this movie starting out, you've got to believe (or pretend to believe) that in all of New York City, a woman who looks like Parker Posey wouldn't be able to find a decent date. It's a romantic comedy with Posey as a troubleshooter working for a boutique hotel, who, after a series of bad passes, meets her potential Mr. Right in the person of a Frenchman played by Melvil Poupaud. So she follows him to Paris, where she loses his address. That's about all the movie hangs on, but it's just enough, if you like watching Parker Posey, which some of us do. Her flat vocal delivery can be liability when the script bails out on her, but after more than 40 movies, most of them independents, she knows what to do with a close-up. There are some interesting parallels between this and Sofia Coppola's "Lost In Translation", but there's more of an edge to Posey's performance than there was to Scarlett Johansson's. Maybe that goes with being a little older. Or maybe she's just more adept at getting beneath the surface, to the face behind the ever-shifting mask.
