Kino Kinetosis

While many of his peers from the seventies and eighties visibly struggle as they approach the sunset years of their careers (Scorcese, Allen, dePalma), Francis Ford Coppola has his gene pool to thank for an unexpectedly estimable cinematic legacy - his daughter Sofia. Her 1999 debut feature The Virgin Suicides was starkly assured, but as always, it would take her subsequent release to determine if her pan wasn't simply flashing. With Lost in Translation Ms. Coppola not only erases all doubts of her (at least partially) hereditary talent, but also displays her father's maverick spirit, a fearlessness toward doing things her own way, as this sophomore effort turns out to be both less and more than you expect.

Foremost to her credit, Coppola is unafraid to do things small. When your father's produced no less than the Godfather trilogy, The Conversation, and Apocalypse Now, it would be easy to assume you're expected to follow with an equally grandiose powerhouse or two. The younger Coppola's genius is her modesty, her insistence that exquisite pearls can also be extracted from merely life-sized oysters. While Coppola père's tastes veered toward the operatic, Coppola fille takes a microscope to the endless mystery of human psychology, and the results are no less formidable.

I know of at least one fellow cinephile (whose opinions I do not take lightly) who walked out of Translation halfway through, and it's easy to see why, as Coppola's portrayal of culture shock comes across as merely obvious and farcical at first. Bill Murray plays pretty much himself, a Hollywood star named "Bob Harris" (certainly a candidate for Most Boring Name to Ever Get Top Billing) who's flown to Tokyo to film a whiskey commercial in exchange for a two million dollar paycheck. Confessing at one point he'd rather be doing a play somewhere, it's clear Harris is far from enthused about this undertaking (also not far off from Murray himself - note how he turned down the Charlie's Angels sequel no matter how much green was thrown at him), ands when he's suddenly in a world so utterly different from his own, his forced grin betrays how lucratively shilling liquor hardly seems worth the ordeal.

Translation's ensuing presentation of Tokyo's urban chaos may seem caricaturish and the targets too easy, but speaking as a former visitor of that massive city, I can attest that the film's municipal portraiture is spot-on. With an endless crazy-quilt of neon signs adorning every available vertical surface, locals whose extreme sense of hospitality tilts toward a discomfiting obsequiousness, and an ineffably alien sensibility toward what constitutes entertainment, Japan embodies the dictionary definition of "foreign" to even the worldliest travellers, and Harris' experience so utterly jibed with mine, a dreamlike state one never truly escapes. Though placed in the plushest of high-rise hotels with every possible amenity, he's still largely paralyzed with culture shock; the showers are too short, the English-speakers' sentences are just slighlty off, and when his commercial's director keeps insisting he deliver his single line with more and more "intensity," both Coppola and Harris understand that comedy is just about the only way to cope with it all.

This out-of-body sense of disconnect is mirrored by Charlotte (Ghost World's Scarlett Johansson), who's in the same hotel but only to accompany her photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) on a job assignment. While her spouse is gone all day shooting rock-and-roll bands Charlotte is left to fend for herself, and she's just about as well-equiped as I was - she breaks into crying fits almost immediately. Anyone who's lived abroad for any length of time can verify the sense of isolation one encounters even as you're absolutely immersed; one's overriding impulse is to flee, and in between marveling at the commercials playing on the sides of buildings as she waits to cross the street, to wondering why the hotel includes self-help CD's among the room's courtesy items, she maintains her powers of denial as long as they'll hold out, her senses negotiating the effect of simultaneous under-and over-stimulation.

Our discombobulated pair eventually start crossing paths within the hotel, having pretty much exhausted their rooms' opportunities for distraction, and while Charlotte's bored by her husband's poseur colleagues, Harris tires of everyone treating him like a celebrity (that is, refusing to leave him alone) . It's both unlikely and inevitable that they should be drawn to each other, and eventually they team up to pass the time in the surrounding neighborhoods, finding it easier to take in all the manga and arcades and pachinko parlors and karaoke booths and flower rituals and stip clubs together than alone.

Murray's movie career has finally lasted long enough that he's starting to be regarded with some eminence (also known as the Charlotte Rampling Effect), and it's well-earned; not for nothing have films like Tootsie and Groundhog Day been so well-received, as they benefited from his immense charm. His face has aged into a doughy and perpetually-bemused mask that can be alternately interpreted as ironic or resigned, and Coppola gives him no small number of scenes to show us that what may have in earlier years been understood as comedic shtick has grown into genuine acting; his endless takes while shooting the whiskey ads reveal his depth of ability, and as the movie progresses we discover how that face can play sad just as effectively.

Johansson cleverly plays off Murray by presenting Charlotte as significantly less distinct a personality by virtue of being almost a third his age. She just graduated from Yale with a philosophy degree but she hardly comes across as deep, and her being married so early only emphasizes the "young" in her young-adult-ness. This sojourn in a foreign land brings into high relief her own sense of indirection, and she's not even sure why she's hanging out with this significantly older married man, she's simply lost and needs someone to anchor her. For his part, Harris seems to enjoy interacting with someone so youthful, and someone who treats him like a rgular guy, and though a part of him may've deep down hoped for things to turn romantic (his 25-year marriage back home is flatlining at best), Charlotte's intentions are clearly innocent, which is a relief to those of us perfectly inundated to this point with Hollywood films where two restless and married persons of the opposite sex always have to end up in the sack together for some reason.

This is where Translation becomes less about how weird Japan is and more about the nature of Bob and Charlotte's relationship. Bob's attitude markedly improves, he starts boyishly shirking his job duties, he seems to be actually enjoying himself fraternizing with the locals, and it's increasingly difficult to tell if Charlotte is or isn't flirting, but it all stays resolutely platonic. After another soul-sucking phone conversation with his subtly snide wife, though, he ends up bringing the hotel bar's British lounge singer into his bed, and Charlotte's clearly disappointed at his behavior, our first clue she cares for him more than as a sidekick.

Don't read past here if you'd rather not hear my take on the film's final scene, but Coppola's successfully and episodically carried us along thus far by refusing to define their relational trajectory, and when it's time for Harris to fly back to the States neither party can initially acknowledge the degree to which they've actually bonded. But then Harris stops the cab and runs back to her, a gesture that finally expresses the effect she's had on him, and the kiss that ensues is both utterly innocent and reveals that a cross-generational romantic affair has occurred on some level.

Bob and Charlotte don't exchange E-mail addresses or phone numbers; neither intends to dishonor their marriage by pursuing things further, but Translation is among the few truly mature films out there (see Brief Encounter or Eyes Wide Shut for wildly different examples) that recognize that married people can still fall in love extramaritally now and then but don't have to profane their matrimonial vows over it. The heart is a complicated mechanism, writing and rewriting its rulebook, and moments like these a person can simply carry within themselves and file away under Life Is Good. The arrival of love in its myriad of forms can do a person a world of good; whereas earlier Charlotte never could sleep through a whole night, refusing or unable to fully adjust to her new surroundings, now she dives right into the crowd after that kiss, shorn of her malaise and buoyed by the unexpected connection with another human being. Not bad for a writer-driector who's only as old as I am - Ms. Coppola's clearly wise beyond her years, and the apple definitely hasn't fallen far from the tree.

Whatever their struggles, at least Bob and Charlotte have the luxury of going back home soon enough; for the illegal immigrants populating the South London of Dirty Pretty Things, however, their very lives depend on successfully navigating the invisible landmines of cultural difference. Director Stephen Frears, another cinematic lion of the last few decades (though with an inexplicably lower profile), has crafted yet another tale that an old NYU pal declared "the most satisfying film of the year," and though I might not deal in such superlatives in this case, Things definitely doesn't dissatisfy.

Critics for many years have pointed out that British cinema is increasingly focusing its attentions on the U.K.'s disenfranchised and marginalized (i.e., minorities, immigrants, the poor), and Things puts them front and center as it follows Okwe (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a Nigerian who juggles two jobs as a chauffeur and a hotel receptionist (he chews on peyote to forestall the need to sleep) while keeping one step ahead of immigration authorities. Since he never sleeps, he needs no fixed residence, and he sometimes rests on the couch of a Turkish girl, Senay (Amelie's Audrey Tautou), who cleans at the same hotel, and is seeking asylum (and therefore shouldn't be accepting employment either).

Okwe is nothing if not endlessly capable, helping procure antiobiotics for his boss at the taxi agency who's caught an STD, helping a colleague make a little extra cash with his own room service after the hotel's kitchen has closed, and brilliantly deflecting suspicion from himself by acting authoritative when two brutes (not 100% Caucasian themselves, ironically) from the Immigration Enforcement Directive show up at the hotel to make sure no aliens are getting paid under the table. Okwe is articulate and dignified, but all around him there's plenty of unsavory goings-on, not least evidenced by the aging Somali who shows up in his hotel boss' office with a gruesome gaping wound in his side, and as he utilizes his immigrant connections at a local hospital to get the mutilated gentleman pharmaceutical help, it occurs to him that his own hotel's probably the site where "he swapped his insides for a passport."

[Also suspicious is the human heart he extracts from the hotel plumbing early in the film, an incident that Frears sadly lets go by without explanation. If illegals here are donating their organs in exchange for fraudulent citizenship via informal operations within the hotel's rooms, it still makes no sense that a whole heart would end up not only divested from someone's body but dropped down a toilet. It's this significant oversight that disqualifies Things from the ranks of the year's best, but it's a creepy enough scene that Frears evidently couldn't resist including - he films part of it from inside the toilet bowl.]

Here's the ethical quandary that slowly wraps its noose around Okwe - when you're already violating labor laws after entering another country without permission, can you still remain untained by all the exploitation and black marketing around you? Okwe can't even call the police to report this heart he's discovered, since he has no legal identity, but nor does he have any rights when his boss at the hotel starts pressuring him to help with these surgeries - he was a doctor back in Nigeria, it turns out, and Señor Juan (or "Sneaky") employs cunning rhetoric to try and win him over - in light of what happened to the Somali, wouldn't he feel better knowing these immigrants were being serviced by a qualified physician instead?

"I don't want to get involved," he repeats, even when the next "patient" is an eight-year-old girl, but his altruism weighs on him - can he truly help by NOT helping? - and the paucity of options available to illegals begins to force him into a corner. (The once-virginal Muslim Senay, meanwhile, is forced to perform sexual favors on her diaphoretic boss to keep her new job at a sweatshop.) To care so much for others is becoming impractical for him, but he absolutely believes that if you "work hard" it'll all work out: "For you and I, there is only survival," he explains to Senay, and not luxuries like moral simplicity.

Steve Knight's script hands us more than couple a dirty and pretty plot twists at this point, none of which I'll divulge here, but they're both ineluctable and deliciously churning, and it's enough to gurarantee Okwe will besmirch his hands in one way or another. Nathan Larson's hypnotic score is more than adequate to the task of complementing Frears' masterful visual composition, and although Things is nothing if not about the dark side and the stripping of illusions, the tale is ultimately touching. (Frears even puts a poster of the late exiled Turkish film director Yilmaz Güney up in Senay's apartment, and he elsewhere accurately telegraphs the distinctly Turkish abhorrence of dead bodies, cultural touches that affirm Things' solid grip of the many cultures it portrays.) Like Translation's central pair, Okwe and Senay part ways in the end, but they'll also carry each other in their hearts indefinitely, and we understand that while we might often be wary of foreigners, they can at least be less foreign to each other.