Word: sofias
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Fulfilling the boundless promise exhibited in her debut effort, The Virgin Suicides, director Sofia Coppola crafts a sublime love letter to both Tokyo and transitory friendship with her newest film, Lost in Translation. Hollywood star Bob Harris (Bill Murray) has been shipped off to Japan to hawk Suntory whiskey to the natives. There he encounters Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), the beautiful wife of a photographer who spends much of her day staring out her window in hopes of somehow finding herself within the city’s skyline. The pair are soon discovering Tokyo culture and a profundity in their friendship...
...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...
Later, when Sofia was about 6, on the set of her dad's film Apocalypse Now she would draw elaborate pictures of palm trees and helicopters and tell stories connecting the pictures. "She was a very imaginative child," says her mother Eleanor Coppola, a documentary-film maker. "But when she played with her friends, she always wanted them to play her way--her story, her costumes. And I would have to say, 'Sofia, not everyone wants to play your way.'" But the kids, inevitably, did want to play Sofia's way. Says Eleanor: "She had that pattern of somehow gathering...
Coppola's new movie, Lost in Translation, was the most buzzed-about entry at the Venice Film Festival, where it snagged two prizes last week. Granted, it's easy to generate buzz when you've got family connections like hers. But waiflike Sofia, 32, with her soft, spacey California surfer-chick talk (expressions like "Yeah, right?" and "Oh, cool" punctuate every sentence), hardly plays the part of the Hollywood brat...
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...