Lost in Translation
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- Bob: I don't want to leave... | - Charlotte: So don't! Stay here with me. We'll start a jazz band... |
Don't stall about seeing Sofia Coppola's altogether remarkable Lost in Translation. It's a class-act liftoff for the fall movie season. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson give performances that will be talked about for years. And Coppola, in her second feature (The Virgin Suicides came first, in 2000), shows the ardent assurance of a born filmmaker. One problem: The fragile plot defies blunt description. How to pin down a moonbeam that tickles you with laughs, teases you with romantic possibility and then melts into heartbreak? Just go with the flow. The Tokyo dream-pop score, produced by Brian Reitzell, helps. Bob Harris, played for something way deeper than ha-ha by Murray, floats in a limo bubble through the neon glitter of nighttime Tokyo. Bob's a Hollywood movie star with maybe one too many brainless blockbusters under his belt. He's in Japan to shoot a whiskey commercial for an easy $2 million and to nurse a midlife crisis stemming from an aimless career and marriage. |
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Charlotte (Johansson) is three decades younger than Bob, but she shares his sense of drift. A Yale philosophy grad, she's in Tokyo with her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi), a slick careerist who leaves her alone to find herself while he's off shooting rock stars. |
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Johansson, 18, and striking in films as diverse as The Horse Whisperer, Ghost World and The Man Who Wasn't There, has matured into an actress of smashing loveliness and subtle grace. It's clear that Coppola, a visitor to Japan since childhood, understands Charlotte from the inside. The movie isn't girly in the way The Virgin Suicides sometimes was. |
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Sofia Copolla's dad, Godfather-trilogy director Francis Ford Coppola, is a film legend. Her husband, Adaptation director Spike Jonze, is a legend in the making. So where does Sofia Coppola even get the guts to step up to the plate? From somewhere deep inside, which is where it counts. It also helps that this thirty-two-year-old director and screenwriter has a style all her own. Her first two features -- The Virgin Suicides and Lost in Translation -- are smartly nuanced and tone-perfect. But don't write them off as chick flicks. There's a core of toughness and emotional risk in Sofia's art and in her life. She survived a brutal hammering from critics when her father cast her (she was nineteen) in The Godfather III. But her mother, documentarian Eleanor Coppola, survived the frenzied, marriage-shaking filming of Apocalypse Now -- she shot film on it and wrote about it. There's steel in these Coppola women, and it's industrial grade. Much like Charlotte in Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola is sizing up the world to find her place in it. Right now, she's the hottest director around. |
By Peter Travers |