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Melvil Poupaud and Parker Posey in Broken English. Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures

At 38, something seems different about Parker Posey. It isn't so much that age has caught up with the actress, but perhaps that others' expectations of her have changed.

"My dad got a letter from someone, one of his friends from way down South," Posey recounts with the mischievous smirk that made her famous. "And [the letter said] 'My son lives up in New York and maybe your daughter and my son could meet. You know, he's not spoken for and she's not spoken for…'"

One eagerly anticipates a cutting rejection from the quick wit that fueled high-school sadist Darla Marks in Dazed and Confused, but instead Posey merely shrugs off the idea with a politeness not expected of an actress who rose to prominence playing hypercaffeinated spitfires. Of course, she can't quite suppress the devilish smirk that helped her get crowned "Queen of Indiewood" in the 1990s with films like The House of Yes and The Daytrippers. So it's surprising that, when describing the character of Nora Wilder, the 30-ish hotel clerk who is at the center of Zoe Cassavetes' emotionally brazen romantic comedy Broken English, Parker laments, "I still don't know what I want to be when I grow up."

Which isn't to say that's a bad thing. Posey's turn in English is getting the kind of buzz that has the once-and-future indie queen reasserting her stake to the crown. English is Posey's second film this year to hail from Sundance after Fay Grim, the companion piece to Hal Hartley's intellectual enigma comedy Henry Fool. (With a plot involving global terrorism, Grim almost sounds like one of Posey's occasional swims into mainstream territory, like last year's Superman Returns.) But the lovelorn Nora is worlds away from any role the actress has played recently.

"The thing about Nora is she falls in love with everyone that she meets," Posey says. "It's just like she leaves herself open to be so hurt."

• Movie stills • Sundance photos

Broken English provided Posey an opportunity to show her range, and she found a kindred spirit in the film's writer-director Cassavetes, the daughter of famed indie filmmaker John Cassavetes and actress Gena Rowlands, who also stars in English. Although it seemed inevitable that Posey would cross paths with a Cassavetes at some point, the collaboration between two of the biggest indie-world surnames came about naturally. As thirtysomething singletons, Posey and Cassavetes could both relate to a world of men who toss off insipid compliments like "you're so refreshing" and the concept of "duty dating," which for the uninitiated is dating for the sake of dating.

"I like to write about things that emotionally and recurrently bother me in my life," Cassavetes says. "I got caught up in the game where everybody was [saying] 'Where's your love? Where's your other house?' And I got swept up in the whole idea that I didn't really have any worth until I found that person. The underneath layer of that is that you don't really like yourself enough to trust yourself. So I just wanted to make a really nice little portrait about what happens when a woman gets caught up in that."