director/screenwriter
Sofia Coppola
producers
Sofia Coppola
Ross Katz
cinematographer
Lance Acord
music
Brian Reitzell
Kevin Shields
editor
Sarah Flack
cast
Bill Murray (Bob Harris)
Scarlett Johansson (Charlotte)
Giovanni Ribisi (John)
Catherine Lambert (Jazz Singer)
Yutaka Tadokoro (Commercial Director)
Anna Faris (Kelly)
mpaa rating: R
running
time: 102m
u.s.
release: September
12, 2003
video
availability: TBA
official
website
other sofia
coppola films
reviewed on this website:
- the
virgin suicides
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Sofia Coppola's Lost in
Translation is a wee, lovely piece about disenchantment giving
way to enchantment. This director's touch is exquisitely gentle
-- so much so that some viewers will inevitably complain that
"nothing happens." I wasn't a huge fan of Coppola's
only other directorial effort, 2000's The
Virgin Suicides, though I acknowledged that she certainly
showed talent, if not a rigorous eye for material (the same is
true of her brother Roman, who made the fetching but problematic
CQ).
Working this time with her own story, Coppola lets it relax and
breathe, devoting herself to moods and moments. The only comparison
I'll make here to her legendary father Francis is that this is
the sort of small, intimate movie he himself has said he's always
wanted to make. For whatever reasons, he hasn't. His daughter
has.
She's also done something else:
American acting very likely won't get any finer this year than
Bill Murray as washed-up movie star Bob Harris, who slouches
towards Japan to do a whiskey ad campaign that promises $2 million.
This is a performance to shelve alongside Murray's work in Scrooged,
Groundhog Day, and Rushmore.
Without any flashy dialogue (Coppola keeps it spare and realistic),
with a bare minimum of movement, Murray damn near writes the
great American novel. Take his karaoke scene. Now, we know very
well that Murray, via Nick the Lounge Singer on Saturday Night
Live, can destroy songs with the funniest of them. Here,
as melancholy Bob, he covers first Elvis Costello and then Roxy
Music; his rendition of "More Than This" certainly
isn't the prettiest I've ever heard, but he makes you feel why
Bob picked the song, what he sees in it, why it defines him.
And the song becomes a heartbreaker.
Drifting around the hotel bar
when he's not suffering the inexplicable commands of his Japanese
director ("More intensity," the translator explains
unhelpfully -- leaving us, and Bob, to wonder how exactly one
might turn one's head and sip whiskey intensely), Bob
catches the eye of a similarly dissatisfied American -- Charlotte
(Scarlett Johansson), the young wife of a photographer (Giovanni
Ribisi) who's in Tokyo to shoot a band. Both Bob and Charlotte
feel adrift in the teeming neon playpen of Tokyo, sitting alone
in their respective hotel rooms and wondering why they're here
-- in Tokyo and in general. Bob has a wife and children at home;
exciting decisions await him there, such as what color the new
carpet should be (burgundy? What is burgundy, anyway?).
Each is noticed by the other
without knowing it, and when they meet their rapport is easy
and immediate. Romance is not an issue, nor is sexual tension;
it's not a father-daughter-type relationship, either. They are
two people of almost the same temperament and level of depression,
and they reach out to each other instinctually and with relief.
The husky-voiced, full-lipped Scarlett Johansson has an awkward,
unfinished beauty, much like her director, and she makes something
tentatively erotic out of her scenes with Murray even though
the scenes have no sexual text or subtext. It's what I would
call, for want of a much better term, platonic eroticism -- the
friction of moods and minds sparking together.
Coppola builds an entire movie
on delicate exchanges, never goes for anything you expect (there's
no stupid scene in which Charlotte's enraged, jealous husband
decks Bob -- the husband is too preoccupied with his assignment
to notice his wife's ennui), and leaves a lot of questions teasingly
unanswered except between the lines. I wondered, for instance,
whether Charlotte even knew who Bob was, or knew and chose not
to let on; this is answered late in the game when a hurt Charlotte
lashes out at Bob. And there's that much-debated whisper at the
end, when Bob tells Charlotte something she hears and we don't.
The more literal-minded viewer may speculate -- pointlessly --
about what is said, but by then, Coppola and the actors have
made Bob and Charlotte so real to us that I simply didn't feel
it was any of my business what Bob whispered. We've been
privy to their shared happiness and despair for two hours, but
their last exchange stays between them, as it should.
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