Masked and Anonymous #06

From my man, Keith Boi:

ARE YOUR TOKYO EYES LONESOME TONIGHT?

What does a terminally jaded, middle-aged celebrity with a periodic taste for tuxedos, and a bored and restless city girl, with an idle taste for self-help books, necessarily have in common?

Nothing much, really; unless, of course, if they are characters from a movie, or from a wonderfully clichéd short story. Or unless they are these two American strangers, stranded and encased in the respective solitudes of their Tokyo hotel lives. Lost In Translation is precisely the subtle tale of the curious connection between a pair of lonely characters caught in the nocturnal time warp of an alien metropolis.

Bill Murray plays Bob Harris, a jaundiced movie star on a weeklong business trip to Japan to shoot a ridiculous and typically gaudy whiskey commercial – which tries to make Murray’s frumpled character with his Suntory whiskey as iconic as Serge Gainsbourg with a fistful of Gitanes.

Chastened by insomnia, the ineffably sullen Harris adopts an unwavering posture of awkward amusement as he marches his way through the hermetic neon wilderness of an ultra-urban Tokyo. On his every turn, the milieu is crass and almost surreal, as Bob self consciously entertains a bizarre coterie of his sycophantic handlers and the local talk show crazies. He attempts to contact his wife and kids, but always manages to make his phone calls at all the wrong times.

Ever the borderline alcoholic as suggested by his advertisement persona, Bob’s only hideaway from the madness is the hotel’s lounge bar – which is where he first chats up this young, neglected newlywed he met, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson). The quietly inquisitive Charlotte doesn’t seem to recognize Bob Harris the burned out actor, neither does she seem to care much for his craggy fame; instead, she identifies with Bob’s isolation drills right away. More importantly, she gently informs Bob that he might just be experiencing his mid-life crisis – only to Bob’s poker-faced acknowledgements, of course.

A tentative romantic friendship forms from their chance acquaintance: the both of them obviously drawn towards each other’s undisguised emotional displacement. For though Charlotte may have a more serene and enchanted view of the city’s foreign charms through her solo wanderings, her sense of loneliness is as palpable as Bob’s. The young woman is coming to grips with the likelihood of a sterile and unhappy future shared with her heavily distracted photographer husband, John (Giovanni Ribisi).

Like a lot of good things, Sofia Coppola’s second feature is deceptively simple. Her sparse, meditative film has an ethereal quality of an inwards nature, not unlike the coy and endearing trysts between the two protagonists.

Her assured direction is evident in how the movie’s focal karaoke scene is handled. Hilarious but also intimate at the same time, Bob and Charlotte’s karaoke date is their unlikeliest rite of flirtation: she dons a pink wig; he pretends to wig out to the excitement; furtive glances are exchanged over Bob’s smartass/sad-sacked renditions of Elvis Costello and Roxy Music, and you can feel their two hearts start beating as one.

A portrait of the kindred bonds that form through mutual disconnections, Lost In Translation is Coppola’s loving testimonial to the molasses of melancholy. And like her first feature film The Virgin Suicides (2000), it feels unabashedly cinematic. I particularly enjoyed those silent scenes trained on the lonesome figure of the fresh-faced Johansson (who bears a disarming resemblance to the director) traveling light or mulling on her own, which lends a touching resonance to the wistful heroine.

Sofia Coppola’s gentle mood piece of a film is generally a more charitable and mature effort than The Virgin Suicides. But it can be argued that the director did a lot of far more interesting things with her adaptation of the Jeffrey Eugenides novel for her aesthetically flamboyant debut.

Directing from an original (and rather gossamer) script she wrote, Lost In Translation feels much more deeply personally – one can’t help but read a bit into the parallels between Charlotte’s preoccupied husband and Coppola’s own spouse, director Spike Jonze – if only for her attention to every frail detail of the film. (Me: Yo man, slight gossip titbit. The 3rd generation Corleone is now the ex-Mrs. Spike Jones)

And this is one movie that hinges entirely on the director’s oblique sensibility, from the well thumbed choreography of potent imagery (Lance Acord’s subdued cinematography has a haunting effect) to the great use of music (it’s a sick thrill to witness how My Bloody Valentine’s Sometimes (Me: Amen to that man!!!) and the Jesus And Mary Chain’s Just Like Honey are so brilliantly employed).

Needless to say, Lost In Translation is the chief beneficiary of a wonderful deadpan performance – lots of blank expressions, lots of quizzical frowns – by Murray and his lethargic eyes; but we had also seen him better in other films, most recently his grand comedic turn in Wes Anderson’s Rushmore (1999). Johansson is no slouch as well, a presence of warm innocence and suitably vulnerable. It’s the hush chemistry between the two lead performances that becomes the true heart of an understated and eloquent film.