By Eric Henderson

Lost in Translation is, by most accounts, the most relevant U.S. release of the fall season until Clint Eastwood’s Mystic River and Richard Linklater’s School of Rock receive their auld lang synes. Sofia Coppola’s follow-up to The Virgin Suicides, the reputation of which is still growing as a preternaturally intelligent cinematic debut, only confirms her talent for striking a unique mood of ephemeral melancholia that is neither depressingly heavy nor left to drift off in arch reverie. It confirms that Coppola has found her muse.

If The Virgin Suicides was typified by a plot momentum that was actually a good deal busier than Coppola’s leisurely execution let on, then Lost in Translation is almost an inversion. It tells a story of an affair that’s barely there by contrasting quiet moments of connection with a vivacious Tokyo setting. Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is an American movie star (possibly washed-up, as there are hints that the Japanese people’s love for him might be for his camp appeal) collecting a tidy sum for smarming his way through a promotional shoot for whisky (“For a happy time, drink Suntory Whiskey!”), though he’s also apparently doing his damnedest to avoid his family. In the same hotel is Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), the idle young wife of an up-and-coming photographer. Both suffer from jet lag, loneliness, and life crossroads, and they forge a friendship that constantly threatens to cross over into something further.

Perhaps Lost in Translation’s most salient asset is in how it completely refurbishes the questionable genre of “old guy—young chick romance” along the same lines as did Ghost World, only Coppola goes even further than Terry Zwigoff by allowing for the possibility of a sensual connection to compliment the intellectual one. Bob and Charlotte’s relationship vacillates between father-daughter and lover dynamics. But neither seems to be a comfortable fit. Often when the two are discussing topics in the father-daughter mode (Charlotte laments that she hates her own writing), Bob’s lack of interest is hardly befitting a father (“Keep writing,” said without any real emphasis). But even as they’re aware that a romance is out of the question, Charlotte is jealous when Bob has a misguided one-nighter with a lounge singer. The two are sensitively painted by Coppola, and their shifting dynamics are as mutable and unpredictable as a mood ring.

Easily as important as her rendering of two ennui-ridden souls is Coppola’s portrait of Tokyo. In collaboration with Spike Jonze’s cinematographer Lance Acord, Coppola slightly redirects the attention of the audience, as well as Bob and Charlotte, away from the unanswered question of romance and toward the diversions of Tokyo’s architectural eye-candy. Also, Coppola’s decision to keep the Japanese dialogue unsubtitled cannot be overpraised. Without overstating, it keeps the notion of Bob and Charlotte’s isolated nature pronounced. Also, the fact that most of the scenes are shot at night creates an added layer of heavy-eyelid somnambulism.

Like Agnes Varda’s employment of Paris in Clèo from 5 to 7, Coppola seems to see Tokyo as a cosmopolitan girl’s playground. Both films find their female protagonists oftentimes in a kaleidoscopic array of mirrors and/or glass. (Even the film’s poster calls to attention to a stylistic preoccupation with multiplaning transparencies, with Charlotte’s clear plastic umbrella draped in front of a holographic brontosaurus projection on a skyscraper.) Though Clèo’s vanity is unmistakably the subject of Varda’s scrutiny through this device, it’s left less clear whether Charlotte is, for example, looking down upon Tokyo’s skyline while sitting in her hotel room window or at her own reflection.

Ironically though, the film’s only minor misstep occurs when Coppola seems to be explicitly looking into the mirror. These are the scenes when she deals with Charlotte’s husband and the Hollywood star he’s supposed to be photographing in Tokyo as she promotes her new “ka-rah-TAY” movie. It’s been well-reported at this point that Anna Faris’s bubbly portrayal of movie star Kelly is an eerily accurate parody of Cameron Diaz (whose presence on the set of husband Spike Jonze’s Being John Malkovich apparently left Coppola cold), and a virtual replay of her star-making karaoke scene in My Best Friend’s Wedding only confirms the satire.  And Giovanni Ribisi does a wicked spin on Jonze’s choked-off, so-obtusely-square-he’s-cool persona. Both performances, quite wonderful on their own merits, are unfortunately undercut with the vaguely distasteful notion that Coppola is airing out dirty laundry. Where does this sudden and unmistakable dalliance with such a thinly veiled dissection of Coppola’s own relationship with Jonze come from?

But Coppola’s mise-en-scene and timid stabs at self-referential, autobiographical bits could easily be dismissed as mere “effects” (especially as she’s not covering any sort of new territory here) if she weren’t so incisive a screenwriter. For my money, Charlotte’s line of dialogue where she contemplatively reveals to Bob that “all girls go through their photography phase” is the most incisive and economic auto-critique of the art-student, coffee-shop, thinking gURL archetype I’ve ever seen. What’s even more impressive is that neither Coppola’s line nor Johansson’s reading of it are even remotely tinged with flippancy. And one couldn’t just pass her achievement off as striking it lucky while writing what she knows, because she understands Bill Murray’s character equally well. Unlike previous Murray antiheroes, Bob is so unwaveringly decent to everyone around him that, even though one can see the vitriolic punchlines welling up inside of him, he’d never actually lash out against anyone. The one scene where he even comes close to doing so (Bob and Charlotte’s penultimate lunch at a cook-it-yourself) is rendered devastating because even when he’s holding back, his cynical, sarcastic side has the power to cut off a relationship dead.

Though most would prefer that the film’s ending (specifically the motivations for seemingly cutting a burgeoning relationship off cold) remain ambiguous, in the great tradition of Brief Encounter cinema, there does exist the remote possibility that the finally dissolved bond was always in the cards. Despite the genre usually showcasing free spirits (at least in its latter years), both Charlotte and Bob seem bound by a sense of respect for tradition. Early in the film, when Charlotte seeks to kill her boredom, she gravitates towards the isolated, hidden exhibits of Japanese customs of the past (ceremonies in Buddhist pagodas, meticulous flower arrangements). As it seems like her relationship with Bob might be edging into dangerous territory, she is confronted with a vision in a public park of a traditionally garbed married couple. It’s also clear, at least as far as Charlotte’s status as an alter ego means that her point of view can be translated from Coppola’s, that Tokyo culture’s penchant for pink-and-yellow gentrified camp is meant to be held in suspect as it is celebrated as a fast, fizzy backdrop.