"For relaxing times, make it Suntory time."

Rating: 8/10 (13 February 2005)

Watching Lost In Translation reminded me of the first week I was in college. The world was foreign and new, and I knew very few people. That first week was difficult, as the only people I really communicated with were those I saw around my dorm. Now change college to job in Tokyo, and change dorm to hotel, and that is the setup for Lost In Translation, the critical favorite of 2003 that won director Sofia Coppola an Academy Award for best original screen play and nominations for best picture, direction and acting for Bill Murray. Murray plays actor Bob Harris who is in Tokyo to shoot commercials for a whiskey. The actual shooting takes very little time, so Harris has to fill the other hours in a place where he knows no one. The most poignant scene for me was when Harris plays golf all by himself at a beautiful golf course in the shadows of Mount Fuji. Golfing by yourself may be the most boring thing anyone could do. Sure, golf is fun and challenging, but the human interaction that occurs while on the course is what makes it what it is. Coppola couples the scene of loneliness with all out beauty, a brilliant green course, the mountain over the fairway, and just one man hitting his golf ball. Harris does find comfort in another lonely American, Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, who's staying in the same hotel. She's in Japan with her new husband while he works, as a photographer. The two find comfort in each other, not for the cliché sexual reasons most movies these days would go, but rather to stave off boredom and overall loneliness. During the nights they spend together, they run around arcades and various other places in Tokyo that most Americans do not know about, and talk about life. Each is married, each not sure they are happy about it. By the end of the movie, we are expecting for them to fall in love, but they don't, and that's what I like about the movie. The easy way out is never taken, just two souls in a foreign land just trying to fill the hours and trying to figure out what it all means. The vastness of the long shots add a wonderful visual style to the film, adding the feeling small, out of water fish in a huge land that does not take them in. Lost In Translation is a very quiet movie, one that is probably better when watched, not heard.