You can wait ages for a Japan themed Hollywood film and then three come at once. In an odd spasm of Japanophilia in 2003, Sophia Coppola’s sophomore effort Lost in Translation was swiftly followed by Tom Cruise’s Last Samurai and Quentin Tarantino’s Kill Bill Vol 1. The latter two may have made more money but Sophia Coppola’s film is the most interesting. On its twentieth birthday, Coppola’s vaguely unsettling and still controversial romantic (sort of) comedy is ripe for re-examination.
The plot, if it can be called one, sees Bill Murray as a veteran Hollywood actor in Tokyo to film a Suntory whisky commercial, for which he will earn $2 million. He encounters a bored and temporarily abandoned newlywed Scarlet Johansson in the pristine but sterile, hermetic environment of the Park Hyatt Hotel. With time on their hands, they find themselves drawn to each other and begin exploring their unfathomably strange environment ‘looking for moments of connection’ as the director/writer put it.
Most attempts to capture Japan on film fail either by being stereotypical and predictable (Memoirs of a Geisha), one dimensional and gratuitously violent (Black Rain) or just plain offensive (Rising Sun).
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