by Allison Rung
Writer and director Sofia Coppola's second achievement, "Lost in Translation," is a great Bill Murray film, yet as the product of such a talented young filmmaker, it's a clear disappointment. Set in Tokyo, the film examines the chilly foreignness that haunts the lounges of fine hotels and the corridors of marriage. Murray's character, Bob Harris, is a movie star equally unsatisfied with his career turn (he poses for whiskey advertisements) and his tame wife-and-kids condominium. Bob finds unlikely camaraderie with a young fellow resident of his uber-modern hotel, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), the listless wife of an up-and-coming photographer (Giovanni Ribisi).
A master of subtlety, Coppola melds the relationship tentatively-merely nudging romance here and there-and develops hardly anything at all. Perhaps Coppola meant for this to illustrate the fleeting nature of human relationship, how happenstance joins two like-hearted souls then pulls them apart. But rather than treating this serendipity with the attentive meditation of which she is capable, Coppola ventures to make a comment on everything surrounding it, and thus Bob and Charlotte's portrait is sub-par, framed by incomplete and unnecessary detail.
For example, Charlotte's identity crisis is at once unambiguous-she's in her early twenties (enough said?), and Coppola shoots her again and again perched gazing by her window, silhouetted by skyscrapers. Her visual cues are enough, yet Coppola squanders two entire scenes to show Charlotte poking around Zen gardens and spying on monks, which supposedly illustrate her spiritual questioning. Likewise, we're afforded a short, confusing glimpse of what we assume to be Charlotte's regular nightlife, in which fiction is salient and the fledgling romance is confined to numb moments in a hallway and taxicab. It's a stretch for the common viewer to sympathize with Bob and Charlotte's professionally catered hotel melancholia (Get a job, I grumbled to Charlotte), so it wouldn't have been a loss to de-emphasize their individual struggles.
At one point, when Bob and Charlotte are cuddling-kind of, Bob ventures to cup Charlotte's foot in his hand, which looks as unerotic as it sounds-Charlotte lists her attempts to enter the world of employment and laments, "I don't know what I'm supposed to be." It seems that Coppola, who can't decide whether she's a comedienne, social commentator or romance weaver, suffers from the same immaturity. Blending genres certainly isn't a mistake, but Coppola's attempt is deliberate, and her greatest strength (as social commentator) is undernourished. The way that Charlotte is dismissed by her husband-receiving pats on the back when she aches for embrace-is poetically achieved, and it hurts that these Coppola moments are so spare.
But it's a great Bill Murray film. Murray's comic timing is as punctual as the S-Bahn-after several years of major-film hiatus he is right back on track. His dalliance with semi-anglophone Tokyoites is hilarious, and even in bits which seem overdone-battles with cardio machines, encounters with the absurdity of prostitutes and cellular phones alike-shruggy old Murray is dazzling. If Coppola fully realizes her talent in her next film, however, her audience won't need the relief.
The beginning of something great
by Tia Subramanian
The opening reels of "Lost in Translation" can be disconcerting; you might be unprepared for the quiet atmosphere it unfurls, its address assured but never flaunting. The strength of the film, and the skill of director Sofia Coppola, lie in the veracity of her observations and the sensitivity with which she coalesces them, so that it's not a 'mood' or a 'style' or a series of anecdotes she conceives, but something more complete-an identifiable, consummate reality. The second shot of the film shows movie star Bob Harris (Bill Murray) watching the city's neon flashes through his limo window with a muted bewilderment that bespeaks a deep-seated defeat; Coppola renders the brassy city with a delicate combination of watchfulness and precise cuts that conveys Bob's alienation without ever turning Tokyo into a caricature.
The relationship between Bob and Charlotte, a recent college graduate frozen with uncertainty in career and marriage, is borne of their coincident disquiet and their disconnection in this weirdly impenetrable place. Coppola is much too intuitive to paint it with the broad strokes of impossible romance clichés. In one scene, Bob spends a night with Charlotte and her friends singing drunken karaoke in a Tokyo apartment. It's clear, by this time, that he's fallen for Charlotte, but his delivery of the song, rather than being hard or wistful, displays no overt emotion. With a steady gaze and small twists of his mouth, he affects ironic humor, and we see the yearning and susceptibility that are stirring him from catatonic misery.
It's easy to underestimate "Lost in Translation" because the dreaminess of its tone distracts one from the stealth of its pacing. In one sequence, Scarlett Johansson's Charlotte wanders through the Park Hyatt hotel and happens upon a press conference for an American action film, in which a hyperactive blonde starlet is spouting nonsense about acting technique. Repelled by the spectacle, Charlotte turns away and enters a room in which Japanese women perform ikebana, the traditional art of flower arranging. Drawn in, she takes a flower and joins. This juxtaposition of the serene the Japanese ritual and the crude American commercialism is a fairly pointed insinuation. But Coppola moves between scenes with such undeliberate grace-and draws from Johansson a reaction so unassuming-that there's not a whit of heavy-handedness to detract from the sequence's effect, and our reaction is as unprocessed and free of judgment as Charlotte's.
In my mind, "Lost in Translation" is distinctive from the average exceptional mainstream film in that it reveals a sensibility markedly different from anything other major directors are working with. Coppola is enormously skilled at conveyance: the eye she turns towards the coldly swanky hotel and the city will be intimately familiar to anyone who has experienced such an unshakable yet oddly personal alienation in a foreign place; her portrait of Harris is a complex exposition of a man steeped in nothing more or less complex than paralyzing sadness. Moreover, she doesn't shy from revealing herself; the narrative has a personality behind it, a composed and appreciative one who's mastered the art of calibration on both technical and humanistic levels. Moved as I was by "Lost in Translation," one of my prevailing feelings upon leaving the theater was excitement at the possibilities it raised-of what Coppola could do next, and of all the extraordinary things she might do over time.