Parker Posey is game in Broken English, although the limited conception of her giggly insecure Nora Wilder is too thin for ninety-six minutes. There’s also the old question of why New York films continue to plunk characters into brownstone apartments that any Manhattanite knows you couldn’t afford even after you killed to get them.

Sad, too, is watching Gena Rowlands reduced to a stereotyped pushy mother, although, in contrast, still all in the family, there are a few stirring father compliments in the romantic comedy written and directed by thirty-plus Zoe Rowlands Cassavetes, who sees it as a “story of self-exploration.” The touristically photographed settings, New York and Paris, are hallowed as respective heavens for singles and for lovers, but young Cassavetes claims also to be under the influence of themes of father John, particularly his “gift for showing people in pain [in] most painful and daring films.”

Suffering is the operative word for the thirty-plus heroine as she bounces from one brief affaire to another and fairly easily into bed but awakening to morning sanity. Coating disappointment with wine and pills, she smiles on the surface at what seem others’ happy unions, toasts best friend Audrey Andrews’ (Drea de Matteo) fifth anniversary of wedded bliss with randy Mark (Tim Guinee), and winces under remarried mother Vivien’s innuendo that she could have had Mark and his trust fund for herself, instead.

Special Services Director at trendy Sullivan House Hotel, she works with Audrey -- in truth neither does much -- who is supportive about Nora’s plight and whose own marriage is in crisis. Bravely swallowing what she views as her own relationship failure after failure, she does the “right” things like yoga, exercise and facials, gets manicures, goes to the standard gatherings, from which she departs early. Prospects do turn up, already committed elsewhere or loaded down with baggage, but as she is about to enter-and-leave an artsy summer party, host Glen (Michael Panes) presents an insistent friend from overseas. Tall and younger than she, fashionably stubbled and one-earringed, Julien (Melvil Poupaud) crossed the Atlantic pursuing an actress, who threw him over, so “I came here to meet you.”

The die is cast, no doubt. For some reason or other, she refuses to smooch with this one as they go to a bar, a neighborhood deli and so on in the usual New York routine that later widens to include such places as little parks, a zoo, a stoop, and her place. For once she doesn’t fall into instant sex, and is amazed that, even so, the Frenchman stays around to make and serve coffee with the sun. Physicality comes soon enough, and during the few days’ idyll he shows himself quieter, more thoughtful and mature than his original come-on, so she is devastated at the news that he flies back home early in the morning.

A Sarah Lawrence arts graduate unaware who, what or where Marseilles is, she refuses to accompany him. Immediately mooning and repentant, however, this most unadventurous unworldly woman walks out on her soulless job of six years and, with Audrey, at the snap of a finger has a coveted flight-and-expenses-paid courier package to hand to someone in Paris.

SPOILER ALERT

There are delaying contretemps and complications alongside the Seine, for Audrey to re-discover her feelings for Mark and their marriage and, having lost Smith-like-surnamed Julien’s phone number, for Nora to summon the courage to be her real self, to love that self even without the relationship love she has not yet found as she boards le Metro for Orly.

Ethan Hawke handled his similar final line much better in Before Sunset. But then, this current film’s “swinging singles scene” is so inconsequential that an audience would be hard pressed to care. An actress like Posey can only do so much, but she does manage it with more charm than anything in Cassavetes’ buddy and frequent project collaborator Sofia Coppola’s extravagantly praised Lost in Translation.

(Released by Magnolia Pictures and rated "PG-13" for sexual content, brief drug use and language.)