Who needs a plot?

Rating: Null/10 (5 October 2003)

I decided upon some laugh therapy and so, set out to see "Lost in Translation". The best part of the film, I found, was the trailer and the production stategy of Sofia Coppola stalking Bill Murray for eight weeks to play the part. Murray's a brillant comic/tragic actor in search of an author to match his talent, it seems. Till he finds it, we just get tantalizing fragments. The film tetters on the precipice of human closeness and falls just short of a plot-less, humor-less travelogue. But then, who needs a plot?

I don't. It is only necessary to loosely connect Harrison Ford with a bottle of Kirin Beer, Brad Pit with espresso-in-a-can and Bill Murray with a glass of Suntory whiskey, all three with the same uncomfortable, "I can't believe I'm doing this" grimace, then put Bill 8,000 miles away from home where he meets a woman who's 8,000 miles from home, each far enough away from their primary and dissatisfying relationship, in an Oriental country where neither speaks the language and dangle them there on the screen, on the precipice of closeness, in front of Western audiences struggling to separate individual identity from the network of relations and institutions in which they are embedded and there you have the non-plot of the film.

I left the theater in a state of dulled grief, craving new forms of plot novelty capable of higher development.