The best trip of the summer

Rating: Null/10 (22 September 2003)

This has been a good summer for intelligent, thought provoking films like the enigmatic "Swimming Pool," the disturbing "Dirty, Pretty Things" and the mystical "Whale Rider."
But Sofia Coppola has come along with what could be the best of them all in "Lost in Translation."
This may be the best "fish out of water" film to hit the screen in a long time. It may be the best travelogue of a big city since "Roman Holiday." And it may be the best May/December romance since Woody Allen's "Manhattan." And Like "Manhattan." this is a film which succeeds on a number of levels, especially visually. In fact, cinematographer Lance Acord does the best job of romanticizing a city since Gordon Willis turned New York into a black and white Ansel Adams show set to Gershwin in "Manhattan."
But viewers who do not want a travelogue should not be put off, either. Coppola stays away from the tourist scenes you might expect to find when a film is about two people frolicking in a foreign land. Instead, she shows Tokyo as a town that is erupting with nightlife, a city that seems made for after hours adventures.
Scenes of video arcades and kareoke bars seem to be ripped right out of a William Gibson novel.The final shots of Tokyo at night are breathtaking.
Beyond the pretty pictures, though, is a story about a middle aged guy and a girl young enough to be his daughter who, due to fate and do to their own restlessness, find themselves thrown together in a Tokyo hotel with lots of time and temptation on their hands.
Bill Murray and Scarlott Johansson both do wonderful jobs of portraying people suffering from the kind of boredom we used to find in stories about the English upper class. Both are unhappily married, although her reasons are more obscure than his, both are well off, both are tempted to find some excitement.
Without getting into spoiler territory, this picture does bog down a little at midpoint. And part of the problem is the problem facing the two protagonists. Neither can get up the energy to do something drastic, because in reality, neither really has to. There is no burning incentive to jump ship for either of them. Both would like something to strike their fancy, yet neither may be willing to risk all they have without a better reason for doing so.
In fact, this picture is in many ways about what used to be called in the 1930s and 40s a shipboard romance. Two people are trapped for five days on an oceanliner crossing the Atlantic and they may, or may not, act on their attraction to one another. But even if they do, everything goes back to normal when the gangplank is lowered at their destination and they go their separate ways. They might meet years later at a cocktail party and may wink or may not. Hell, they might not even remember.
Luckily for us, Coppola has written a pretty good third act to this story and the action picks up in the end, although the ending is a little too enigmatic for some tastes.
But then, that's not always bad.
Maybe the closest thing to this film since Woody Allen's "Manhattan"(1979) was the late Claude Sautet's remarkable 1995 film "Nelly and Monsieur Arnaud," which featured a fascinating May/December love story between Michel Serrault and the amazingly beautiful Emmanuelle Beart. Beart, in an interview, said the story was about two lonely people who just needed somebody to talk to at a juncture in their lives.
True enough and perhaps our hearts go out to the lonely so willingly, that we want them to consummate their relationship just so they, and we, won't be lonely any longer. That's the feel Coppola left me with through her film.
But "Nelly" took the "ships passing in the night" idea to a different level by having the characters there let the chance slip away. And the looks on both their faces as they go their separate ways are worth the price of admission all by themselves.
One doesn't quite get that feeling in "Translation," because you get the feeling the full story has not yet been written.
Do see this film. I intend to see it again and as soon as possible.