Observational & Naturalistic

Rating: 9/10 (21 December 2003)

Lost In Translation is a film that makes demands on the audience much as early French new wave movies did; you're expected to do some work.
Young Coppola is also a filmmaker who has swallowed Andre Bazin whole - film is observational, naturalistic, not about artificially pumped up plotting and "character's journey". It's about people. Real, often inarticulate, incomplete people who will stay that way for the journey of the movie - as actual folks tend to do with their actual lives.
Bill Murray (in his best role since Groundhog Day - is an actor reduced to doing Suntory Whisky commercials in Tokyo. He's not happy camper and, as he says, he could be doing theatre somewhere else. But that's just an alibi - he knows he wanted the dough and the gig - he's hit the wall, in life, in love.
Some of the best scenes show endless retakes with the deranged 'hot' film director of the cinema ads and reminds us of the famous underground tapes of Orson Welles endlessly redoing a commercial voiceover for 'sun kissed frozen peas': art and commerce are tragic bedfellows. And language and misunderstanding are equally fuels for waste and tragedy.
But in fact the movie is about something more wistful and, in the end, gentle: missing a chance at love. Scarlett Johansson, that pale revelation as Rebecca from Ghost World (Terry Zwigoff, 2001), is a young graduate philosopher ('pro bono' for the time being) visiting Tokyo with her dazed photographer husband (Giovanno Ribisi) and finding the world abroad is less challenging and fulfilling than even her own muddled marriage.
Lost in Translation is intelligent, calm filmmaking brilliance and the pace is something that comes to seem as inevitable and right as the delicately handled and serenely restrained love story that drives this quite marvellous movie along.