Review

Worthy Oscar winner. This touching film, set in Tokyo, is based on a simple script, well acted and directed.

Bill Murray is the perfect Bob Harris, worldly wise and world weary in successful middle life, and perfect gentleman to Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson. She, young enough to be his daughter and relatively green, has studied philosophy but married a brainless photographer who neglects her. When she meets "Mr Harris," as the Japanese always call him, he seems the answer to a question posed to her earlier by a reincarnation video (bathos intended): "Did you ever wonder what your purpose in life is?"

Theirs is a human attachment more than a romantic relationship. On the occasion they share a bed, they remain fully clothed and do not touch, except when, reluctantly, he puts his hand on her injured foot. Earlier he had taken her to see a doctor for that foot, without a hint of patronising her. The message is clear; this is the sort women look up to. He could so easily have taken advantage of her, but does everything to avoid physical intimacy. Women will appreciate the litotes and emotional complexity of this scene better than any man can.

Directed by Sofia Coppola, the film is thought provoking, even philosophical, but only if you want it to be. Set in unfamiliar Japan to emphasise the characters' isolation, the script injects humour through the inevitable difficulties with language. It is funny rather than witty, and only in parts. The comedy is generous in the first half, and always subtle, even when absolutely hilarious. Engage your intellect or you might miss it. Even so, a larger part of the story-telling is subdued, slowly descending to sadness, though never dull.

Early scenes evoke a world which is shallow, pressured, closed, dimly lit, interior. Outside views appear mostly through windows, either car or hotel windows. The largeness of the outside world is in sharp contrast to the smallness of their personal cosmos. Bars and hotel rooms provide most of the backdrops, stressing their loss of control over small personal details. Both would rather be somewhere else, but are trapped in a place of dislocation and helplessness, a metaphor for their disconnected, unfulfilled lives. They are lost, not only 'in translation', but also in place and time. His wife, phoning from America, is preoccupied by trivia like the colour of carpets, and sounds as brainless as Charlotte's husband. This shared loss is what links the two protagonists to each other and to us watching them. He says "I am lost." She says, "I'm stuck. Does it get any easier?" They both earn our sympathy and affection.

It is tempting to accuse him of a mid-life crisis, but Coppola makes it clear his complaints against life are perfectly justified; and besides, the younger Charlotte faces a much bigger crisis. He is a genuinely better man who says "thank you" to the stripper before walking out, and would rather be "doing a play somewhere" rather than this lucrative whisky commercial, thousands of miles away from his son's birthday. And having studied philosophy, she needs a man like him, not just for a shoulder to lean on but to be guided by. Admirably, Coppola inserts no feminist qualifications, and none are needed. Both are fully capable and independent characters, but human enough to need warmth, company and understanding. Coppola also dismisses the view that you must have sex for these needs to be fulfilled between a man and a woman.

Perfectly suited to each other as human beings but irrevocably separated by their age difference and respective marriages, the film successfully portrays the cruelty of two soul-mates condemned never to combine their destinies. She tells him about his wife, "With her you can discuss what it was like growing up in the fifties," without a hint of sarcasm. They fall for each other's deeper qualities. The undercurrent of sexuality, strongly emphasised by their bizarre meeting in the strip-club, does not surface. We now know for sure he is a full-bloodied heterosexual male, but any intimacy is held off to the very end, a powerful goodbye kiss, and only then does he use her name for the first time.

© John K Smyrniotis
London 2003

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