Broken English

Written and directed by Zoe Cassavetes. Released by Magnolia Pictures.

Broken English is the debut of writer-director Zoe Cassavetes, the daughter of famed director John Cassavetes. By coincidence, it was another film by the daughter of a famed director, Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, that I was thinking about through most of the movie.

They’re not actually very similar movies, and I don’t mean to compare them too much. Broken English stars Parker Posey as Nora Wilder, a thirysomething woman having difficulty with her love life. As she’s getting older, she’s becoming more and more desperate to find the perfect man, and starts to realize that this is leading her into progressively disastrous relationships and flings. At a party, though, she meets Julien (Melvil Poupaud), a Frenchman visiting New York, and after a couple days they realize that they really like each other. Unfortunately, he returns to France, and after moping for a few days, Nora and her best friend Audrey (Drea de Matteo) decide to fly to France and look for him.

I got to thinking about Lost in Translation as I began to realize that the movie was not going to be very interesting from a strictly narrative sense. Instead, it was all about creating a mood, and letting that mood permeate through the audience. It didn’t matter at all whether Nora was able to find Julien or if he was going to be happy to see her. What mattered was the state of Nora’s character, and being able to relate with her feelings of loneliness and desperation.

Unfortuantely, as with Lost in Translation, this is either something that you can relate to or not, and if you’re not, the movie’s going to leave you behind. And with Broken English, that’s what happened to me. It’s not that I don’t understand what it’s like to feel lonely and a little scared, but for whatever reason, I wasn’t feeling it.

That said, I’d guess that this is something that just depends from person to person. If someone else feels differently about the film, I’d have no argument. If it speaks to you, then it speaks to you, and who am I to argue?