Nothing short of a masterpiece

Rating: 9/10 (10 January 2004)

Sofia Koppola is one of those directors who had both easy and hard times as an aspiring (and now working and justly respected) director. Easy time because when she decided to adopt burt easton alice's novel `virgin suicides' to a movie, she could have rest assured that she'll have all the guidance, resources and co-operation of all parties involved to turn her script to a movie and the movie- a commercial success. after all, when one's father is the Don Korleone of directors, anyone would be reluctant to rub him the wrong way or anyone might end up sleeping with the fish (no, not murdered just stuck as director for jamboree videos). That's the easy time part. If you haven't figured out the hard time part, read the last paragraph again.
In laymen's terms, Sofia Koppola encountered day in and day out with critics such as myself who decided to overlook her talent of which she has in abundance, and anyone who saw Lost in translation, couldn't possibly refute that, Don koppola or not.
The film's plot (which might do injustice to the film itself), revolves around a young woman (the unbelievably gifted Scarlett Johansson) who joins her husband in japan, where he works as a photographer, and spends most of her free time trying to figure out the peculiar (putting it very mildly) nature of the country she's in. When her husband's leaves for a shooting assignment elsewhere in Japan, she encounters an aging American movie star (Bill Murray) who's shooting a commercial for a whiskey and gets a hefty sum of money listening to a director with lethal level of Caffeine in his bloodstream . Their common loneliness leads into a mix of deep friendship and semi sugar-daddy infatuation.
Japan never received a positive viewpoint in Hollywood cinema (Black Rain and Rising Sun are the first examples that pop in my head), and in this movie too, Tokyo is a city infested with gigantic commercial electronic billboards, alienated environment and people who all look like their auditioning for an Asian version of the night of the living dead.
One of the greatest obstacles in contemporary romantic films in Hollywood dealt masterfully in this film, is the tacky aftertaste to emotional scenes. making emotional scenes that aren't artificially flavoured in kitch has turned into an art and Sofia Koppola, aided with a well reserved script and excellent acting on both Johansson and Murray's part, turns into the Rembrandt of film making, thus establishes as the new voice of contemporary film and take hold of the helm her father abandoned about two decades ago.
This movie has an undefined quality to it, a quality that transcends acting, script or even pacing, it's a quality of mature viewpoint of a young person provided by both director and leading actress, an
outlook that is refreshing on the one hand and wizening on the other.
Summing up: this movie is by far the top three movies of 2003 (along with Dirty pretty things plus i'm leaving room for return of the king which i have not seen) and is well worth babysitting arrangements. Furthermore, if you go to japan, take a videocam and a commercial load of prozac.
9 out of 10 in my filmOmeter.
p.s. a week later a saw a documentary about the suicide phenomena in Japan (over 33,000 took their lives in 2002, mostly because of the recession) so take the prozac advice seriously.