The Last Remake of 'Brief Encounter'

Rating: 5/10 (30 March 2007)

This film was, as many people before me have written, dead boring. It was deliberately about self-important, dead boring Westerners visiting what had once been a vibrant and fascinating country but which increasingly since the Meiji Restoration has become a pale clone of Western modernist society - and thus both as boring as the original and a parody mirror held up to any inquisitive Westerner.
The base plot line is a pinch from the slightly more charming 'Brief Encounter' which challenged the traditions of fidelity after the passion has departed. In this film, Murray's character seems to be inwardly devoted to his wife and family, remote in the US, but outwardly unafraid of a little dalliance with a not-quite-single white female. She is just bored and bored some more - and then deserves to be bored. The Japanese modernists whom they meet up with seem way too modern and the couple drift back into their comfortable, if dull, lives.
I have to confess that the person I took to the cinema to see this film dozed off and snored half way through the film. Nobody in the audience complained - perhaps in sympathy - perhaps out of amusement at a little diversion. I'm afraid it was that kind of film. If you wanted action and dialogue they just weren't there in abundance. If you find watching autumn leaves slowly wend their way across the lawn, into the street and then into the opposite gutter, this is your kind of film.
Ava Gardner famously once said of 'On the Beach', shot in Melbourne, 'what better place to choose for a film about the end of the world?'. One could say that Coppola is saying much the same of modern Tokyo in regard to the death of civilization.