Prefab alienation, eloquent mood

Rating: Null/10 (5 April 2011)

What is commonly misrepresented as servitude and repression in Japanese culture, is actually a powerful belief in the order of things, in that the world is not meaningless cacophony but arranged in a pattern. Their newborns they register by name in Shinto temples, that is upon a higher court of law. The desire to abstract this in every aspect of their life is in tacit understanding of a world that makes sense as it is, whose apparent imbalance reflects beauty. Imbalance implying an unfinished process or space, where imagination can pour.
Which is to say for example, that offering flowers to the spirits of the dead cannot be a simple devotional gesture, it needs to reflect an abstraction (which is by their cultural default, beautiful). This prompted them to create ikebana, their complex flowering arrangement philosophy, itself a meditational practice carried out in silence. This desire is never more apparent than in their creative expression (ikebana, Noh, etc), which is governed by a rigorous system of rules. It makes sense then that their modern culture (which exists upon a rejection of the old) appears crazed. The exuberance of their metropolis is an expression of what was pent up for centuries.
Into this comes Sofia Coppola, equipped with knowledge of Wong Kar Wai. She observes Japanese life, not unrespectfully, and is mostly awed by it. The order and chaos of Japanese life she experiences mostly as spectacle, like her tourist characters do. The film exists then on a surface level and lyrically expounds on it, it has melody but little understanding of music.
As a mood piece where the lights of the nightscape are reflected on glass panels, the film is adept. The camera she hurls out there on foot captures magic, disorientation. I love the shots of neon streets, but then I love them anywhere I can find them.
But a lot of the rest feels like precooked food to me, easy to swallow, with an artificial taste. It takes no effort to digest this, it's sweet and bitter when you expect it to be. Every time the spouses of the two protagonists appear in the film, in one form or the other, the alienation they feel is never less than blatantly obvious.
It doesn't help that Bill Murray has to carry this, his snarky smartaleck shtick is hardly palatable for me in other films, here it positively cheapens the thing. When I saw him wake up next to an amorous affair of a night he doesn't remember, I smacked my forehead. Of course, now she will show up and the thing will turn sour.
This is halfway a good film for me, halfway an average one. It sparkles in a few rare instances ("this is all we have", in the karaoke scene), but a lot of seems like a film designed to be a certain way.