LOST IN TRANSLATION Rating: NNNNN
Rating: NNNNN
Sofia Coppola’s Lost In Translation has just won a trio of prizes from the Toronto Film Critics Association: best picture, best actor and a share of best screenplay. A small-scale film, almost a chamber comedy, it’s about two Americans at loose ends in a big Tokyo hotel. Bill Murray’s a fading American movie star shooting a whisky commercial, and Scarlett Johansson is a young wife waiting for her photographer husband to finish shooting celebrities. Coppola has an unusual emotional fluidity as a director and uses the Tokyo setting to emphasize the isolation of the characters. Murray is an unexpected choice here, and Coppola uses his patented inability to seem authentic at any given moment to full effect. His mournful croak in the karaoke scene on Roxy Music’s More Than This is one of the oddest and most affecting musical moments in any movie of the last decade. (December 19-23, Bloor)
