2003 · R · Film
A film about the particular loneliness of being somewhere beautiful with the wrong people — or almost the right one.
Sofia Coppola’s third feature is one of the quieter achievements in American cinema — a film that holds loneliness and tenderness in the same frame without choosing between them. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson play two Americans adrift in Tokyo: an aging actor there for a whisky campaign, a young woman accompanying her largely absent husband. What passes between them is not quite romance and not quite friendship — it is something more honest than either, the recognition of a shared displacement that neither can quite name. The film does not hurry. It lets the city breathe around its characters and trusts that the audience will sit with the silences.
Watch it late, or on a night when sleep is not coming easily. It rewards the kind of attention that is slightly tired and slightly open — when the defenses are down and a film can reach places that daylight watching won’t allow. It is particularly good when you have recently been somewhere unfamiliar and alone, or when you are with someone you haven’t quite figured out yet. The ending is unresolved in exactly the right way. Some films earn their ambiguity. This one does.
VERDICT · A film that knows what it’s about without saying it aloud.
POUR · A whisky highball, light on the ice. Or whatever the minibar offers at 4am.
Planning an evening around this? The Foreign Film Night →
Leave a Reply