LOST IN TRANSLATION (2003) ¢ ¢ ¢ ¢
D: Sofia Coppola
Bill Murrray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi
This movie starts out with a point-blank close-up of a woman's butt. The woman's lying on her side on a bed facing a window, and has pink panties on. The panties conceal very little, and the camera seems to linger there forever, leaving you plenty of time to consider a) How come we're looking at this woman's butt? b) Whose butt are we looking at? c) Did a woman really direct this picture? and d) That's a real nice butt. After watching "Lost In Translation" from beginning to end, I still don't understand what the point of that shot is, but you do learn in the first couple of minutes that the butt belongs to Scarlett Johansson, playing a young woman named Charlotte, who has tagged along with her husband, a celebrity photographer on assignment in Tokyo. While he's out shooting rock bands, she's stuck with little to do except lounge around their hotel room, take in the tourist sights alone, and hang out in the hotel bar, which is where she meets Bob (Bill Murray), an aging movie star who has come to Japan to shoot a whiskey commercial. Charlotte and Bob strike up a friendship. That's the story. That's the film. Well, okay, there's a little more to it than that. There's a slow realization in both of them that they could be soulmates, except for the 30-year gap in their ages, the even wider gap in their lives, and the high probability that they're only going to know each other for three of four days in a far-off corner of the world. The beauty of Sofia Coppola's script and direction is how much she reveals abut Charlotte and Bob without anything being said, or without us knowing what's being said. The leads are cast perfectly, especially Murray, an actor playing an actor whose whole life is essentially an act. Murray has played variations on this character his whole career, but the face behind the mask has never looked more naked or resigned. Johansson's bored, dreamy Charlotte plays a lot like her bored, dreamy teenager in "Ghost World", but this time she mixes in a barely articulated yearning for something beyond her reach, something she can't yet identify or understand. Charlotte has more depth, suggesting that Scarlett might have more depth, too. That and a real nice butt.
