Strange encounter

Rating: 8/10 (18 October 2003)

My favourite actors are those who have their own special hilarious humour and do not completely lose it when cast in a so-called "serious" or "sad" movie. Bill Murray is such an actor. My favourite films are those like Punch-Drunk Love and Lost in Translation, where directors have used comical actors in non-comedies in intelligent ways, using their well-known kind of humour and playing with audiences' expectations. Coppola has written the role of Bob Harris for Bill Murray, and no one else yet known would have done a better job than him.
But not only when you focus on its male lead, Lost in Translation is a wonderful film. Scarlett Johansson (of whom I admit I had never heard before) is young but strong, beautiful and mysterious, the perfect cast for the strangely fragile Charlotte she portrays. The "chemistry" between the two is fantastic, although they are of different age and experience.
The first thirty minutes are funnier than most of what I saw this year. Afterwards the film retires a bit, becoming slower and more openly melancholic without giving up its humorous approach completely. How could it? The strange encounter between two strange people and a country which is even stranger must result in laughter at least a couple of times: be it a light or a depressed kind of laughter.
And then there is Tokyo. I don't know how it comes but Coppola showed me this town quite like I imagined it to be (without ever having been there) but from very distant angles, which makes it appear really beautiful as well, not just gaudy, hectical and sterile.
I think I should go to see this movie once again. But doing so, I believe, would only make me love it even more than I do now.
And I should visit Tokyo.