Word: coppola
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...screen, the only grudging Western take on Asia was a comic one: Sofia Coppola's widely praised Lost in Translation, with Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson as two Americans who strike sweet sparks while stranded in Tokyo. These two characters are acutely and lovingly observed in contrast to the Japanese bit players, who fit all the dumb stereotypes: they're short of stature and long of wind, they constantly take photos, and damn 'em, not enough of these people speak English! The U.S. dominates so much of the world, politically and pop culturally, that it seems astonished to discover that...
...movie, a dreamy meditation on midlife crises and the nature of transient connections, Murray plays Bob Harris, a disillusioned movie star in Tokyo to shoot a Japanese whiskey commercial. Scarlett Johansson is Charlotte, a newlywed accompanying her workaholic husband (Giovanni Ribisi) on a job. Coppola shot the film in 27 days and stuck to a relatively minuscule $4 million budget. For some of the scenes, she recorded with no sound and rolled the cameras just to capture a mood. And she purposely used high-speed film to give the movie a homemade intimacy. "She waited for us to have...
...Coppola's small conceit is refreshingly personal. Many of the scenes and much of the dialogue were culled from conversations she overheard, her experiences and those of people she knows. "I feel like anything you write is autobiographical," she says. "Even The Virgin Suicides was, and I didn't write [the book]." Her visual cues are taken from photography: the Playboy photos of Sam Haskins inspired the soft-focus, fleshy look of Suicides; the idea of running around Tokyo taking snapshots gives Lost in Translation its look of spontaneity. She tweaks every costume herself. From the fashion to the photography...
Work has kept her and her husband apart in recent months, so for the moment, Coppola plans to take a break. But she's keeping an eye out for her new film project. After living under the long shadow of her famous name, the dilettante is working hard to live...
Lost in Translation revels in contradictions. It's a comedy about melancholy, a romance without consummation, a travelogue that rarely hits the road. Sofia Coppola has a witty touch with dialogue that sounds improvised yet reveals, glancingly, her characters' dislocation. She's a real mood weaver, with a gift for goosing placid actors (like Johansson, who looks eerily like the young James Spader) and mining a comic's deadpan depths. Watch Murray's eyes in the climactic scene in the hotel lobby: while hardly moving, they express the collapsing of all hopes, the return to a sleepwalking status...