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LOST IN TRANSLATION (green)
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In November, 2001, two months after 9-11, the Boss and I took a long-planned vacation in central Italy, those towns other than the big tourist centers. After two weeks during which the only English we had spoken was to each other – somewhere the trip, we passed Harrison Ford on a billboard, holding up and glumly contemplating an Asahi Beer like a superannuated Hamlet with a cylindrical metal Yorick – one rainy gray morningin Parmawe were having breakfast at a random hotel when we overheard a Kansas twang asking about eggs. Like thirsty desert crawlers upon an oasis, we fell on this genial guy, luxuriating in the most mundane me-Yank you-Yank relief that expressing a thought need not be an exercise in mouth contortion, accent abortion, and meaning mutilation.
Aging Bob Harris (Bill Murray, RUSHMORE) is an over-the-hill leading man now reduced to grubbing two million bucks by hawking Suntory whiskey, embarrassed morose expressions flitting across his oatmeal mug, one after another in the manner of the 'lat pack,' as his Japanese Gen-X director exhorts him with toothy breathlessness. In between shoots, he endures the loneliness of the lost outsider. He calls his hectoring wife on a cell phone while soaking in a oversize dimly lit tub, studies Fed Ex'd carpet swatches hoping desperately to pick the one least objectionable to her, and prowls the underlit purgatory of the Tokyo Hyatt's penthouse bar, where a piano-and-soprano duo called Sausalito croons show tunes before cigar-smoking salarimen. Somewhere amidst his nocturnal wanderings Bob encounters Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson, GHOST WORLD), young bride of slacker rock photographer John (Giovanni Ribisi, BOILER ROOM), herself a bit of drifting marital flotsam. Theyshyly fall upon each other in taciturn me-Yank-you-Yank empathy, two outsiders united by their isolation.
Across the slowly scrolling billboard of Murray's face, we see that Charlotte, by her quiet tolerance, represents everything his home life lacks: adoration, companionship, unconsummated desire, acceptance, trust. So they can lie in bed together, fully clothed and atop rumpled but unused sheets, talking intimately until gently, hesitantly, he puts his hand on her foot. But that is all. Their increasing physical contacts– a tired head on shoulder, a sleepy tuck-in – are supremely chaste, their mutual desire the eroticism of the consciously platonic. A kiss would tarnish their friendship; consummation would ruin it.
Director Sofia Coppola has a sure visual eye and the confidence neither to trick up her film with a gratuitous sound track nor to clutter it with zany peripheral characters. And she understands these two people, Bob and Charlotte, in a way that suggests she once was one of them. Where her skill falls a little short is in the dialog; in many scenes we ache to hear what has been left unwritten and thus is left unsaid. Though knowing what she wants to convey, unlike more experience writer-directors (Mamet, Stoppard), Coppola has yet to learn how to write dialog that sparely but precisely sketches moments with a minimum of plain words. Fortunately, Murray bails her out, carrying the film in a subtle, painful Pagliacci, even if Johansson to some degree struggles to persuade us that she really is a whip-smart Yale graduate who just happens to have pouting bee-sting lips.
Not so much funny as wryly bittersweet, LOST IN TRANSLATION is memorable and engaging, and even as it makes you wonder why anyone would ever visit Tokyo, it makes you glad you had this peep into its nights.