Here’s a cheery line from the press notes to Woody Allen’s Irrational Man, opening Friday (July 24). “I’m a great believer in the utter meaningless randomness of exis­tence,” quoth the esteemed American filmmaker. “All of existence is just a thing with no rhyme or reason to it.”

While some of us might wonder how the Woodman gets out of bed in the morning with that kind of existential nausea pressing down on his miserable Upper West Side life, let’s at least acknowledge that a universe built on chaos still has some benefits.

“The randomness of it all,” says Parker Posey, in the midst of describing to the Straight from New York how she was cast in Allen’s 45th full-length feature. “I was in Krakow, Poland, with [casting director] Juliet Taylor. We were both on the jury at the film festival, and she thought there was something about me at the time that was right for this movie.”

Taylor’s instincts in this case were flawless. The role of Rita Richards—a blowsy, bored, and probably alcoholic chemistry prof at a leafy East Coast college—fits Posey like a glove, and she feasts on the role. Richards looks to newly arrived philosophy star Abe Lucas (Joaquin Phoenix) for bourbon and sympathy, although his own hunger for meaning is leading Abe into some fairly murky ethical waters, familiar to anyone who’s read Crime and Punishment or watched Alfred Hitchcock’s Rope.

“Maybe because I’d become disenchanted with the movie business?” Posey muses, when asked what Taylor was sensing when she envisioned her in the role. “Rita’s trapped and lonely. It’s just what happens at a particular age. You just wake up and start to question, ‘What is this life I’m living? I’m not really satisfied.’ ”

Not to give the wrong impression here. Posey is a breezy presence on the phone, and musters a good zinger about her own defence against the inexpressible bleakness of a life bereft of purpose. “I have to create order out of being a freelancer,” she says, with a snort. “And dealing with my path as an actress.”

And while she clearly admires her director, not to mention her costar—“He’s so jazz, like Woody”—Posey proposes a much less inert personal philosophy.

“We’re a collective consciousness evolving tremendously and changing, and the test of what it is to be human and the experience of that is intense at the moment. And challenging,” she says. Right! She should try doing all that with kids!

“I do it with my dog, Gracie,” she shoots back, giggling.