Despite her directorial debut film The Virgin Suicides being a critical success and launching Kirsten Dunst to A list status Sofia Coppola nearly abandoned film-making for the world of costume design. On the evidence of Lost In Translation she must be an incredible designer or have no concept of her true talents.
Bill Murray plays an over the hill film star who jets into Tokyo to shoot a whisky advert. Bored and jet-lagged in his hotel he begins a relationship with Scarlet Johanssen, a young wife unsure of what to do with her life.
Lost In Translation is an incredibly subtle, soulful film centring on a career best performance from Bill Murray. If a picture paints a thousand words his tired face tells is more that a thousand scripted lines could. The slow collapse of his and Johanssen's marriages, one old, one young, are flawlessly observed through snatches of dialogue and acres of crucial words left unsaid. The core of the film. that communication is hard with anyone ; lover or stranger, is never overstated and always utterly convincing.
The quality of Coppola's writing is evidence for re-incarnation with the way she appears to show first hand experience of range of different lives. The film never sets a foot wrong, is never indulgent and portrays a fully formed view of world that is alien yet compelling and real. One to savour again and again.