A beautifully acted and observed mood piece with a perfectly integrated and carefully chosen music score, it's a movie that rewards its audience for paying attention and has a cumulative emotional impact that is all the more powerful for its subtlety.
Sofia Coppola’s second production is one of the most poignant and sensitive indy films to come out of America in recent years.
Based in Tokyo, Bill Murray plays the cynical, fading actor making some easy cash in Japan, while also avoiding his wife in America. Scarlet Johansson is the wife of a trendy young photographer, bored in the hotel while her husband goes off on shoots. They hit it off and their relationship develops into something indefinable.
Lost in Translation could easily have been a disaster – a clumsy love story, full of stereotypes. Instead, it is a subtle, ambiguous exploration of how relationships develop and how it feels to be immersed in a different culture.
Murray and Johansson, under the direction of Coppola, have given us a unique film. Warm, witty, yet gentle – this love story is genuinely touching.
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Sofia Coppola's wonderful film LOST IN TRANSLATION is one of the more interesting American films of recent years. A beautifully acted and observed mood piece with a pe... more >
Sofia Coppola's wonderful film LOST IN TRANSLATION is one of the more interesting American films of recent years. A beautifully acted and observed mood piece with a perfectly integrated and carefully chosen music score, it's a movie that rewards it's audience for paying attention and has a cumulative emotional impact that is all the more powerful for its subtlety.
Unlike much that comes to us from Hollywood these days, there's no need to bludgeon us with SFX or manipulative emotion. Here the simple beauty of an unrequited love affair between two lost souls in a modernist, barely recognisable Tokyo, segues perfectly with director Coppola's inspired use of mise-en-scene. Objects, buildings and decor are all of a piece and form an important visual representation of the alienation from their environment felt by the central couple. LIT ultimately proves itself to be perhaps the best movie about the pain of unrequited love since Max Ophul's LETTER FROM AN UNKNOWN WOMAN (1948). Scarlett Johansson may be a more modern young woman than Joan Fontaine's memorably delicate and damaged heroine of the earlier film, but it's hard not to feel moved by the gradual realisation that she may well be trapped in a marriage of convenience. Special mention too here for Giovanni Ribisi - he's excellent in the small but vital supporting role of Scarlett's young photographer husband.
Fine supporting roles nothwithstanding, LIT is essentially a two-hander. All those Scarlett Johansson 'face of 2004' articles are justified, but then we already knew about her talent from The Coens' THE MAN WHO WASN'T THERE and Terry Zwigoff's brilliant, underrated GHOST WORLD, whilst Bill Murray, like a good wine, just gets better with age. LIT is also touchingly and hilariously funny. There are so many cherishable moments in this film and it also requires keen observation and intelligence from its audience, something that's increasingly rare in American cinema these days.
Murray's performance is exceptional here. Along with his equally fine turn in Wes Anderson's RUSHMORE (also available on DVD and another US indie gem) It may well be this most interesting of American actors' finest ever performance. Whether showing his now trademark "relaxed boredom" (no other way to describe it!) at a hilarious whiskey commercial shoot ("For relaxing times: Suntory times"), or extricating himself from the unwanted advances of a high class Japanese hooker, Murray's ability to seem disinterested yet simultaneously elicit audience identification and sympathy is never better realised than in Sofia Coppola's beautifully directed film.
Coppola herself is one of the more interesting young filmmakers around. Married to ADAPTATION and BEING JOHN MALKOVICH auteur Spike Jonze. she also, apparently, hangs out with some of the coolest of indie rock heroes, notably Sonic Youth's Thurston Moore and Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine (Shields composed most of the score for LIT by the way, the main reason to buy the excellent soundtrack album). Coppola seems a genuinely unaffected talent and by all accounts gives her actors the space to perform and improvise whilst having a very clear idea of what she wants from them.
Briefly, a word on the supposed 'anti-foreigner' stance some critics have mistakenly accused LIT of: this is, of course, utter nonsense. The movie's title itself is the clue to Coppola's intentions; the feelings of alienation are universal for anyone spiritually 'lost' in a foreign country. Moreover there is gentle fun poked at Japanese customs but far more emphasis is placed on a respect for local traditions (check out Scarlett's telling visit to a Buddhist temple and silent observation of a young Japanese couple's marriage, for example). And in the often biting satire of American culture it could be successfully argued that LIT represents more of a rejection of the American tendency to force its 'culture' on others than it does any form of attack on Japan and the notion of 'foreignness'.
Finally, after her fine debut THE VIRGIN SUICIDES and now LIT, in my humble opinion Sofia Coppola joins Wes Anderson and Spike Jonze as part of the most interesting and innovative triumvirate of young American directors currently working. I also recently read the great news that Bill Murray is currently filming with Wes Anderson again after RUSHMORE and THE ROYAL TENNENBAUMS, so their productive collaboration looks set to provide another must see little gem later this year! < less
Sofia Coppola’s follow-up to The Virgin Suicides finds Bill Murray’s struggling actor Bob Harris washed up in Tokyo, where he’s in town to shoot a Suntory commercial a... more >
Sofia Coppola’s follow-up to The Virgin Suicides finds Bill Murray’s struggling actor Bob Harris washed up in Tokyo, where he’s in town to shoot a Suntory commercial and finding that his sole challenge is to come up with new ways to hold a whisky glass for the cameras. One night, across a hotel bar, his eyes lock with those of young Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), bored wife of a hip photographer, and the two form a bond: insomniacs apart from the rest of this crazy world, engaging in a form of extended pillow talk with no chance of sleep at the end of it.
The primary location may be Japan, but its secondary focal point is Murray’s face. Many of the film’s best scenes have the actor playing off against the locals: you remember that Murray never seems to understand the actions of those around him in American-set comedies, and infer the situation can only be exacerbated overseas. Coppola coaxes another great performance from him, but she could equally rest her movie on
the lifetime’s worth of longing in Johansson’s eyes, and in the supporting cast. Anna Faris does a shrewd impersonation of a particular type of blonde Hollywood starlet, banging on about her metabolism.
The use of Tokyo as a character in its own right – a third party to this platonic affair – reminds one of Godard, or Chris Marker: if Sans Soleil had a plot, however thin and wispy, it might have turned out something like this. That sense of cinema as recalled memory – and that same wispiness – was just as apparent in Coppola’s debut, but Lost In Translation casts a spell slightly wider than that of the hermetic The Virgin Suicides, which limited itself to the reminiscences of teenagers raised in a specific suburb at a specific point in the 1970s.
To put it rather more bluntly than anything in a generally subtle, incrementally affecting piece of work: you don’t have to be a middle-aged man like Murray’s Bob Harris – heck, you don’t even have to be a man – to entertain the fantasy of romancing Scarlett Johansson (or, indeed, any other stranger in a strange town) in a hotel far away. Coppola, meanwhile, goes about carefully and skilfully preserving the spaces, silences and carefully chosen words out of which romantic possibilities are constructed: maybe it’s just the context, but The Jesus And Mary Chain have never sounded quite as joyous and triumphant as they do over the end credits here.
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MovieMail Podcast Latest edition: Diamonds of the Night - Graeme Hobbs explores an extraordinary debut film that follows the desperate journey of two boys who escape from a train bound for a concentration camp.
