Nice, but not great

Rating: 6/10 (23 February 2004)

I've just seen the movie and it was fun but didn't moved me.

The movie is about homesickness and not much more. It is a bit predictable and nothing much happens, but maybe that was the directors intention: to present just a bit of the characters' lives, without a very deep analysis.
The best of all were the actors. More than half of the merit is theirs, especially if they, as I've read, improvised some of the dialogues. I also liked some scenes very much, but a sum of beautiful scenes is not necessarily a beautiful movie.
"Lost in translation" reminded me a lot of Doris Dörrie's "Erleuchtung garantiert" (Enlightenment Guaranteed) in many aspects (first of all, the setting, and the general feeling, too). The problem is that Dörrie's film was made in 2000, and the story is so much better than "Lost in translation". At least for me, this movie arrived too late. If you enjoyed Coppola's one, try the other one, even if you find it too similar, and you'll see it's far more complex and fresh.
My impression, with all due respect, is that Sofia Coppola can afford to make movies because of her last name. I'm not sure that people would be thrilled about her movies if she weren't Francis Ford Coppola's relative. In my opinion, if I think of "Virgin suicides" (movie that, BTW, I hate, it bored me to death; I didn't get it at all), she is making progress: this is a richer movie, with more flavored dialogues and more round characters. But I don't know if that is enough to win awards. But she is young. Maybe, with time, she'll come to make the sort of movies at least I love.