Nice story

Rating: Null/10 (23 May 2004)

This is a fairly straightforward tale.
Bill Murray is Bob Harrison, a US movie star spending a week in Tokyo to promote whiskey.
Scarlet Johansson is Charlotte,with her photographer husband, and like Bob is essentially bored and lonely and feeling slightly dissillusioned with everything.
The movie is basically about true platonic love between the older Bob and the teenage Charlotte, who spend a lot of time with each other and find something beyond true friendship.
The story charts the progression of their relationship and counter-balances it nicely with the feeling of despair they both feel in the unfamiliar Tokyo.
Performances are uniformly excellent with sympathetic characters mixed with irritating and quirky ones, which all meld nicely together to make a fairly involved narrative.
It's simple, effective, and above all, it gets the equilibrium of all its elements just right.
Recommended.