Lost in Translation (2003)
Directed by Sofia Coppola
Two lost souls visiting Tokyo -- the young, neglected wife of a photographer and a washed-up movie star shooting a TV commercial -- find an odd solace and pensive freedom to be real in each other's company, away from their lives in America.
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32 films that influenced Lost in Translation
What critics say influenced Lost in Translation
The film is a showcase of four fundamental things: first and foremost, Bill Murray ’s try for an Oscar nomination, and he certainly deserves one, giving a great character performance not unlike Jack Lemmon ’s role in Save the Tiger or even Kevin Spacey ’s in American Beauty .
The film is a showcase of four fundamental things: first and foremost, Bill Murray ’s try for an Oscar nomination, and he certainly deserves one, giving a great character performance not unlike Jack Lemmon ’s role in Save the Tiger or even Kevin Spacey ’s in American Beauty .
In fact, he's going through a midlife crisis not unlike Kevin Spacey's character in "American Beauty."
Attractive and pleasant as it is, there�s no escaping the impression that it feels like an overly hip exercise in soul-searching for those who thought American Beauty really did �look closer� at life.
The scenario closely resembles that of American Beauty and dozens of other Lolita-esque melodramas: the elder man seeking a younger woman to find fulfillment in his empty life.
There's a touch of Katharine Hepburn in Summertime during the film's Kyoto sequences, where Charlotte wanders temple gardens and observes local ceremonies.
There is little sense, as there is in, say, the Venice of David Lean's Summertime or the Vienna of Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise, that the city and its residents are tangible places and people among which the characters do indeed have affecting, intimate experiences.
Theirs isn't a romantic entanglement in the classic sense (at least not in the way Marcello Mastroianni and Anita Ekberg's was in Fellini's La Dolce Vita, which plays on a hotel television in one scene), though plenty is exchanged between the two.
And so, with Charlotte’s husband away for the shoot, they wind up sharing a bed, watching La Dolce Vita and discussing their lives.
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The whole whiskey-commercial idea is straight out of Chaplin’s A King in New York, with its deposed monarch doing TV ads for Royal Crown Whiskey — and it was a lot funnier in the Chaplin movie, where it had a real payoff that’s missing here.
But I wasn’t quite as impressed as I was apparently supposed to be, and I feel oddly left out because of that — like I have the old Lewis Stone role in Grand Hotel, and am complaining, “People coming, going — nothing ever happens,” unaware of the intense drama unfolding around me.
After a while, taking a line from Tender Mercies, it's hard to trust happiness anymore when happiness feels so ephemeral compared to the weight of grief.
The picture itself is composed all of subtle gesture and obscure movements, one of the world's great metropolises haunted by ghosts, motion, and hallucinations, placing Lost in Translation in the company of work like Wim Wenders' Tokyo-Ga and Wong Kar-wai's Chungking Express.
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Francis Coppola perfected a style of moody, existential filmmaking in his 1974 masterpiece The Conversation and then seemed to abandon it.
I can understand the criticism, but I was so enraptured by the overall proceedings - some of which reminded me a bit of what Paul "Risky Business" Brickman has crafted in his two films - that I didn't mind.