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Review:
Lost in
Translation (2003,
Focus/American Zeotrope) is a bigger film than it
sounds, coming from Zeotrope and Coppola (directed
by Sofia Coppola), and if nothing else, it provides an inexpensive way to see
stunning shots of the world’s most expensive city to visit, Tokyo (as well as
Kyoto). Other than that, it is self-consciously art-movie for its own sake. An
aging actor now filming wine commercials in Japan (played by Bill Murray), falls for a
nubile young woman (Scarlet Johansson), who is allowed to go on the loose by
her own husband. It is kind of your basic George Gilder “sexual princess”
scenario. Nevertheless, there are great lines about the rather pointless
lives of the character: she isn’t making it as a writer (who is?) and his
whole life changed once he had kids—wow!
His wife, on a phone call to the states, asks, “Can I trust you?” But
the views of 21st Century Tokyo (even the airport) are stunning. What this
movie proves, of course, is the existence of heterosexuality. (No male
homosexual that I know, at least, would have short or written a film like
this.)
Broken Flowers (2005, Focus, dir. Jim Jarmusch,
R, 107 min) is the kind of film only Bill Murray could make work. Here he
plays a heterosexual bachelor Don Johnston, who, at the prompting of literary gumshoe
Winston (Jeffrey Wright), and after receiving a mysterious unsigned pink
letter telling him that he has a son from one of his earlier “relationships”
goes on a quest to find him. He meets all four women, who provide increasing
levels of confrontation. In one case, he stares at a fish patty dinner; then
he communicates with a cat, and finally he gets beaten up by the last woman’s
redneck protectors. Back home, The Kid (Mark Webber) shows up. He wants to
study philosophy, and I find that interesting. Johnston buys him a club sandwich, and tries a
final confrontation. The Kid, of course, grew up without a father. On Murray can turn self-indulgence into a provocative
mystery. There is one early scene of total female nudity. The broken flowers,
occasionally shown, provide visual metaphor.
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