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Hmmm... I didn't like it, and I'll try to explain why.
Went to see "Lost in Translation" weeks ago and had very high expectations. The movie was reviewed anywhere as a real deep and artistically valuable product. Despite seeing "The Virgin Suicides" and having found it dull and superficial from many points of view, I wasn't skeptical (well, only a bit towards those who compared Sofia Coppola's ability to Francis Ford Coppola's, who still remains on a different level, so I was a bit bothered by the gratuitous comparison). I find Coppola's daughter has some ideas, but ends making appear them banal. I don't know... I didn't like her previous movie as well for the same reasons: she wants to say too much in a refined and delicate way, but ends saying nothing. The style is almost perfect (if you don't count minor goofs like microphones floating over Bill Murray's head in the bath scene, details of the setting appearing and disappearing etc.), but content is somewhat inconsistent. She always seems worried to make her movies look like authorial non-commercial ones, especially the feeling I got is she tries to imitate the melancholic and nostalgic atmosphere of some French movies, but the spirit is not the same. I think "Lost in Translation" had good potential, but frankly I expected more from it. To me looks like Sofia Coppola doesn't have deep knowledge of "real life". Her depiction is generic, stereotyped and not well-developed. She uses lots of quotations from other movies, she tells the story from the point of view of a person which has always lived sort of life that only few people, not the "common people" (haha, Pulp is everywhere nowadays! sorry, I had to say it!), can live, but most of all she shows life and feelings of her characters thru clichés: the way of representing Japan and its culture from a conventional Western perspective that has the same depth of a school trip video diary, the background stories and the personalities of her characters, also secondary ones, like Charlotte being a young married woman who studied Philosophy in New York and moved to Los Angeles with her extremely cool, young and successful but emotionally distant photographer husband who has an embarassigly stupid and vain actress friend - with blond hair! -, the fact Charlotte hasn't found her place but looks like she could be a writer - always the typical desired occupation for those who can't find their place in world and society! -, the fact Bob is the average troubled actor with the average over-invasive wife, thus he has to flirt with the first young and pretty American he can find in a foreign country after resisting and admiring her in a very platonic way for most of the movie, the fact he has the pointless and out of place sexual encounter with the captivating redhead singer, all these references to marriage and solitude and being away from home that seem more taken on loan from other sources than the original product of the mind of the screenwriter and director, and so on. Sofia Coppola shows her characters with false genuine sensitivity, but making it look a lot like it is sincere. Not her fault, probably it's her personal experience that shaped her artistic taste, when it comes to building and describing a story and its characters. That's why her movie had good wasted potential IMO: her style is smooth and so is her analysis, but everything sounds unoriginal, she scrathes the surface with grace, but doesn't explore anything in depth. When the movie ended I felt blank. Not moved nor particularly irritated. Nothing. I just got the impression I usually get when I read one of these pseudo-juvenile books, written very well with a proper and elegant use of rethorical artifices by authors who have this strong upper-bourgeois mentality, also regarding art and its purposes, and that lack any kind of true content able to really involve and stimulate meaningful cogitation in the audience. Not saying this is a terribly bad movie overall, but it isn't good either. It is mediocre: it's an excellent exhibition of style, but emotionally frigid.
Maybe this movie will do well at the Oscars, but only because it has no real adversaries.
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