It’s currently an exciting time to go to the movies in the Twin Cities. Brief runs have just ended for Olivier Assayas’ incredible Demonlover and a revival print of Singin’ in the Rain; tonight marks the beginning of the annual GLBT film festival at the Oak Street Cinema; the next few weeks will unveil retrospectives of documentarian Frederick Wiseman and Russian master Andrei Tarkovsky; and thanks to Mac Cinema president Dorothe Singer ’06, the German thriller 23 (a huge international hit that’s never been given a theatrical release in the U.S.) will screen on campus this weekend.

Maybe it’s because I have all this to look forward to that I barely remember Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation, which I saw not even a month ago. Still, I’ve felt pressure to write on the movie since the word-of-mouth popularity around campus has made me want to better articulate what failed to grab me about it.

Lost in Translation, for those who haven’t seen it or talked to someone who has, depicts the unlikely friendship of a washed-up movie star named Bob (played by a curmudgeonly Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), the young wife of a hip photographer, against the backdrop of contemporary Tokyo. Actually, the movie is set in the hotels and clubs of contemporary Tokyo, as the characters spend much of their time idling while waiting to complete their singular obligations. For Bob, it’s shooting commercials for Japanese whiskey and appearing on a talk show; for Charlotte, it’s simply being her husband’s wife, meeting celebrities with him and waiting for him to return from shoots outside of the city.

As in Coppola’s debut feature The Virgin Suicides, the emphasis is on ambiance over storytelling—a quality that one doesn’t find in American filmmaking of this prestige. In fact, the moments I remember best of Lost in Translation are purely imagistic: the table lamps of cocktail lounges and close-ups of Scarlett Johansson’s ass in tight pink underwear like fresh fruit in cellophane. At heart, the movie feels like a collection of photographic experiments, recording the textures of human skin as it appears in various impersonal lighting (Murray’s weathered face is particularly emphatic here).

What Lance Acord’s cinematography strongly suggests is that Lost in Translation is a movie about lonely individuals trapped in an overbearing, technologically-advanced society. It’s a theme more poetic than prosaic––and one of the main causes for the film’s praise. Yet it’s far from the first movie to write such verse, and if there’s one thing that bugged me most about it, it’s the liberal borrowings from films by contemporary Asian directors like Wong Kar-Wai (Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love) and Tsai Ming-Liang (What Time is it There, Vive L’Amour).

Granted, neither filmmaker is Japanese, nor are they stylistically identical: Wong is from Hong Kong, and his films tend to be expressionistic, colorful and fast-paced. Tsai, on the other hand, is from Taiwan, and his films tend to be wry, concentrated and emotionally reserved. Still, the central conceits of both men’s movies are pretty similar to Coppola’s here; they are also fascinated by the complex relationship between loneliness and the busy urban landscapes of east Asia.

What Time is it There was one of the best movie-going experiences I’ve had so far in college: its minimalist humor seemed created as though to compliment and counter the tricky logic of contemporary Taipei and Paris.

Christopher Doyle’s cinematography for Wong (in cities as different as Buenos Aires and Hong Kong) ranks among the best in modern movies, finding mystery and romance in even the most commonplace lighting sources. I mention Tsai’s humor and Wong and Doyle’s images because Lost in Translation recalls them––not to mention the bittersweet despair I associate with both––in almost every scene.

“It is another quaint example of an American art cinema that never materialized,” wrote Dave Kehr of Carnal Knowledge and the other ambitious movies of its era with which he grouped it. I’d refrain from being dismissive of Coppola’s film, or any other American movie for that matter.

The fact is that there’s always been an American art cinema––Harmony Korine’s movies (Gummo, julien donkey-boy) are some of the more recent experiments that come to mind. Even if there hasn’t been a concentrated domestic movement in the vein of the Italian neo-realists or the current Taiwanese new wave, there’s still plenty of alternative visions to savor.

I don’t see a problem, either, in American directors borrowing from other national cinemas (in case I sound as though I’m putting down Coppola out of principle).

Gus van Sant’s Gerry, another work with gorgeous cinematography and American movie stars, often steals blatantly from filmmakers like Tarkovsky and Abbas Kiarostami. What made it one of the more interesting movies I’ve seen this year, however, was the ways in which it reinterpreted those directors’ styles in an American idiom, arriving at new things to say about our particular culture.

Lost in Translation doesn’t just borrow the style of Wong or the Taiwanese new wave; it borrows their landscapes and moods as well (not to give away the climax, but its willed ambiguity is pretty similar to that of In the Mood for Love). I’m

not sure if the film’s conclusions have anything to say about American culture either, since Coppola so strongly implies that things will start looking better for her protagonists once they get back to the states and have more people to hang out with.

A minor controversy has arisen over the movie’s depiction of the Japanese. I don’t think Coppola goes out of her way, as some have claimed, to make the people of Tokyo seem naïve or belligerent. Nonetheless, the film rarely characterizes the city beyond its aggressive, invention-mad surfaces.

Some may argue, then, that Lost in Translation is about qualities that exist wherever one finds urban ennui—such as self-doubt and heartache. In this case, the carefully captured images count for very little, and Coppola’s movie is ultimately about transience. But how do you film transience? If Sophia Coppola is not, in fact, a sensitive copy artist, then her ambitions could develop into some of the most fascinating in cinema.