Overrated

Rating: 5/10 (14 September 2008)

All men recall a woman from their past that sticks in their mind, not as some drop dead gorgeous goddess nor as some hideous dog that made them want to retch, but simply because they were in some way, however minor, interesting. That interestingness may have been their looks, their quirks, their persona, or some indefinable 'otherness'. Well, that's what the film Lost In Translation is- it's not a bad film, nor nearly as good as its reputation proclaims, but it is unlike just about any other Hollywood or indie film to come down the pike in the last few decades.
That it was nominated for and won a screen writing Oscar for director Sofia Coppola is just plain silly since the film's resonance and character creation comes from its visual images, not its too spare writing. An aging, former American film star named Bob Harris (Bill Murray) comes to Tokyo to film an ad for a brand of scotch. Like many American film stars in real life who refuse such stateside, lest oddly believe they'll dampen their credibility as actors, he accepts the enormous sum the Japanese sponsors offer him- $2 million- for a week or so's work. There he meets the Gen Y wife of a hip young photographer named Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson). They have little in common save their shared loneliness and insomnia when Charlotte's husband John (Giovanni Ribisi) goes off for a few days on a shoot. Charlotte is a typically aimless young soul who peripatetically bounces between wanting to write or photograph, & seeking an outlet for her philosophy degree from Yale, while Bob is a lethargic middle aged man who's not so much in crisis mode as he is in ennui to the cosmos. Still, as stated, the movie's visuals are its real charm- the scenes of Tokyo's night life, neon, the odd angles that Charlotte looks down upon life from in her hotel room, and especially a beautifully filmed, yet hauntingly lonely shot of Bob playing golf in the foreground of Mount Fuji, add almost enough poetic resonance to the characters that the script lacks to pull off a viewer's belief in their romance. Sofia's brother made a far superior film a few years ago that dealt with many of the same themes of alienation. CQ, for whatever reasons, did not seem to strike a chord the way Lost In Translation did. The reason for that is probably because CQ was not as 'serious' an art film as Translation.