Sleepless in Tokyo

The vision of Bill Murray singing Roxy Music's More Than This in a karaoke bar will remain with me for a long time. The moment in Sofia Coppola's film is perfectly poised between humour and sadness; a critical balance that characterises the movie.

Directing from her own script, Coppola leaps from the modest success of her debut, The Virgin Suicides, to this remarkably assured film of two strangers meeting in a strange land and finding sanctuary in their brief encounter.

Murray is Bob Harris, a Hollywood movie star sliding gently into middle-aged twilight of fame, who arrives in Tokyo to shoot a whisky commercial. Permanently jet-lagged, he haunts the hotel bar, attempting to drink himself to sleep. Between random long-distance telephone conversations with his wife, he is pressured by his agent to extend his stay in order to appear on a Japanese television chat show of appalling crassness.

Staying in the same hotel is Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a smart girl whose two-year marriage to a photographer (Giovanni Ribisi) is coming apart as he abandons her to her own devices while taking pictures of a rock band. Listless and alone, she drifts around the hotel like a ghost until she inevitably meets Harris. Companions in alienation, they strike up a friendship that is almost entirely platonic. It is that "almost" that keeps the film on a razor's edge of anticipation, desire and hope.

The tensions revolve around a failure to communicate, bewilderment, exhaustion and passion unfulfilled. Nothing much happens and there is a tantalising ambiguity buried in the concluding scene.

And yet, from this seemingly slim material, Coppola has fashioned what will probably be one of the movies of the year. Shooting on digital video, she renders the tiniest detail with a delicacy approaching perfection and is totally in command of her film grammar, following sequences of brief, dialogue-free scenes with one or two lengthier ones driven by conversation.

The city itself becomes as much a character as Bob and Charlotte, with the jangling tumult of the streets and arcades and the constant buzz of neon creating a soundscape that is alien and mildly unnerving.

Murray is in his comic element as the wearily bewildered actor, bemused by the Japanese politeness and language. But what makes this his best screen performance are the layers he brings to Bob: a man who loves his children yet seems strangely distanced (metaphorically as well as literally) from his wife. He is adrift but not marooned; vulnerable but emotionally intact.

Johansson doesn't once strike a false note, expressing intelligence, frustration and vulnerability all at once. From the mischievous opening shot of her derrière in a pair of diaphanous knickers, she is effortlessly luminous and her understated performance is perfectly attuned to Murray's superb study of a man wrapped in Cellophane cynicism.

A marvellous, exquisite movie.

Lost In Translation
Cert: 15