![]() While Murray eventually agreed to play the part, he did not sign a contract Coppola spent a quarter of the film's $4 million budget without knowing if he would actually appear for shooting. ![]() ![]() Coppola envisioned Murray playing the role of Bob Harris from the beginning and tried to recruit him for up to a year, relentlessly sending him telephone messages and letters. She began forming a story about two characters experiencing a "romantic melancholy" in the Park Hyatt Tokyo, where she stayed while promoting her first feature film, the 1999 drama The Virgin Suicides. Further analysis by critics and scholars has focused on the film's defiance of mainstream narrative conventions and its atypical depiction of romance.Ĭoppola started writing the film after spending time in Tokyo and becoming fond of the city. The film explores themes of alienation and disconnection against a backdrop of cultural displacement in Japan. Giovanni Ribisi and Anna Faris also feature. There, he befriends another estranged American named Charlotte, a young woman and recent college graduate played by Scarlett Johansson. Bill Murray stars as Bob Harris, a fading American movie star who is having a midlife crisis when he travels to Tokyo to promote Suntory whisky. Coppola has the talent to back it up.Lost in Translation is a 2003 romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Sofia Coppola. Being the daughter of Francis Ford has its privileges - like making small independent films about two characters in Japan. Murray's career and one that hopefully gets him the recognition he deserves. This isn't the Bill Murray who was so wonderful in "Groundhog Day" or "Rushmore". Murray lets Bob come alive, but always with the sad knowledge that this is a fleeting moment - one that cannot last and cannot be consummated. When he finally connects with Charlotte, Mr. The pleasantries he exchanges with his Japanese hosts are as scripted as the Whiskey ads he must perform each day. Bob is tired for so many reasons - he's jet-lagged, he can't understand anyone around him, he'd rather be doing some real acting, oh, and his marriage lost its spark long ago. He wears the role of Bob Harris like an old suit. Johansson is a naturally captivating actress with more going on under the surface than most of her peers.īut it is Bill Murray who is the revelation in this film. While she doesn't live up to the promise of her performance in 2000's "Ghost World", Ms. Perhaps that's why the script is more reticent to dissect that character. It's possible that the character of Charlotte is Ms. Johansson continues to use her preternaturally smoky voice to good effect, but she has a difficult time creating a full character out of the small strokes in Ms. Coppola's script flirts with wisdom and others which are underwritten, but the movie is at its best when it allows the characters to be themselves lost in their foreign world, like a scene in a hospital waiting room between Bob and an incomprehensible (to a non-Japanese speaker) old man. Coppola is so determined to have her characters teeter on the edge of romance that the film begins to meander from one happy flirtation to another until, in an inspired bit, Bob has a dalliance with a lounge singer to add some tension to the proceedings. Each shot is composed almost as a still-life, and that's where the film errs. Instead, they spend the film being the company that each of them so desperately needs. A bond forms between Bob and Charlotte that defies Hollywood norms the characters don't jump into bed. In "Lost", two characters find themselves in Tokyo for very different reasons: Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is an American movie star doing one of those foreign advertisements that movie stars wouldn't be caught dead doing in America, and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is stuck waiting for her filmmaker husband (Giovanni Ribisi, amusingly Spike Jonze-ish) to return from a shoot. It's tough enough to travel around Europe, but the Asian languages are so foreign to Americans that the Far East might as well be another planet. The hotel becomes your provider, supplying crucial time-passers like saunas, cocktail lounges and, above all, other people who speak your language. As writer-director of "Lost in Translation", she manages to capture that feeling of lonely sleeplessness that always comes with jet-lagged nights in foreign countries. I imagine Sofia Coppola has done her fair share of jet-setting.
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