Back in the sixties, when the movie-porn revels were just getting under way in San Francisco, I knew a young man who occasionally took part in the industry as an actor. My friend would receive puzzling instructions from his director: “I want you to make love with cold passion.” But what in the world was cold passion? How do you produce it? I thought of his dilemma when I saw Bill Murray, in Sofia Coppola’s “Lost in Translation,” attempting to deliver a commercial tag line in a way that pleases the director of the commercial. “For relaxing times, make it Suntory time,” Murray says over and over. Murray plays Bob Harris, a movie star whose career is winding down. Stuck in Tokyo, where he’s shooting the whiskey ad, Bob knows that he’s whoring—he should be at home with his family, he should be doing a play or looking for a movie—but he needs the money. The director, a small Japanese whirlwind with lots of tousled hair, shouts voluminous and detailed instructions, which Bob’s translator renders simply as “more intensity.” But how do you say something inane with more intensity? Murray works through one take after another, and his ironic, slightly over-the-top final version is superb. He achieves cold passion.
Sofia Coppola, directing her second movie at thirty-two (“The Virgin Suicides” was the first), is an observer, not a dramatist—at least, not yet. This is not entirely a weakness: there are veteran directors, and many new ones—working, say, in action pictures—who never observe a thing. They lack Coppola’s ability to see, to record, and to allow the juxtaposition of character and milieu to reveal itself, unharried, on the screen—in this case, to capture the loneliness and humor of a solitary soul looking out at a noisy world. Arriving in Tokyo, Murray’s Bob Harris gazes blankly from his limo at the frenzy of light and movement and then looks down from the upper stories of his hotel without seeing a thing. He could be a visitor from another planet. He can’t make a connection with any of it, but he can’t go to sleep and shut it out, either. The Japanese, in their politely insistent way, make all sorts of demands on Bob, and he’s buried deep within himself, lost in some frozen realm of sadness and disgust, too jet-lagged and defeated even to get angry. At the hotel, there is an American woman, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson, from “Ghost World”), who’s in something of the same situation. Barely out of college, Charlotte is in town with her husband, a jumpy fashion photographer (Giovanni Ribisi), who’s rapidly slipping away from her into his work. The sensual Charlotte is in need of appreciation, and she gets it from Bob. The middle-aged actor and the young woman, unhappy with their spouses (Bob’s wife is just an exasperated voice on the telephone), are caught in emotional limbo; they want change, but they’re unable to risk it. Stranded and sleepless, and almost wordless, too, they hang out together day after day, an odd, inappropriate couple sharing a common funk.
Coppola doesn’t punch up her scenes; she’s not interested in tension leading to a climax but in moods and states of being. She’s willing to let an awkward silence sit on the screen. Not much happens, but Coppola is so gentle and witty an observer that the movie casts a spell. She captures the sleek pomp of a luxury Japanese hotel, with its intimidating high-tech look, its abundant staff mysteriously stepping out of the shadows and offering unwanted assistance in beautifully mangled English. And she re-creates the comedy of tourism: the elegant Tokyo hooker, sent to Bob’s room, who whips herself into incomprehensible ecstasies screaming “Lick my stockings!” (or is it, as poor Bob wonders, “Rip my stockings”?); the dark rooftop bar in which third-rate American lounge acts knock themselves out to keep the guests from falling into a stupor. All this activity plays off Murray’s sangfroid, the small changes in his expression—a flicker, a tightening, a demi-smile—which suggest a world of melancholy and desire below the surface. Murray has never been this quiet, this wary, this subtly acid before—or this warm. The drama of the movie, such as it is, lies in seeing just how much he will respond, and when.
When Bill Murray was young, he made comedy out of untrustworthiness; in middle age, he has turned into one of the world’s most appealing hipsters. He’s no longer surprisingly hostile; now he’s surprisingly benevolent. Charlotte, rousing herself, grabs Bob by the hand and takes him around to parties and clubs in Tokyo, where he gets drunk; when he sings a blues ballad in a karaoke joint, the emotion pours out of him with startling force. The relationship is perched on the edge of eros, but the way the movie is set up, it can’t fall off the perch into an actual love affair, and although Coppola’s taste and her determination to keep the anecdote small and ambiguous in feeling are admirable, the movie could use something grander, fiercer—danger, perhaps. It takes a great deal of courage for a young director to make a movie without action; it takes even greater courage to allow something momentous to happen. Coppola already knows many of the secrets of character, atmosphere, and comedy. Now she has to learn that she can shape a movie dramatically without slipping into banality or vulgarity. She’s two-thirds of a great director, which, of course, is a lot closer to greatness than many of the directors working in Hollywood ever get.
Okwe, the African-in-exile hero of Stephen Frears’s extraordinary London thriller, “Dirty Pretty Things,” drives a cab during the day, works as a desk clerk in a posh hotel at night, plays chess with friends, and keeps himself awake by chewing on some sort of African root. Like Travis Bickle, Robert De Niro’s overstimulated psycho in “Taxi Driver,” Okwe never really sleeps, though his restlessness is not propelled by loathing, the way Bickle’s is; he’s a good man, even a fanatically good man, which makes him a possible fool and victim as well as a hero. In four or five frantic days, Okwe tries to save another immigrant, Senay (Audrey Tautou), who, like him, is in England illegally, from the machinations of the cheerfully sinister manager of the hotel (Sergi Lopez) in which they both work. Señor Juan, as he’s known, offers forged passports to illegals in return for a kidney or some other vital organ that he can sell on the medical black market. There are a few grisly scenes in the hotel’s tasteful rooms, but “Dirty Pretty Things” is not a violent thriller. It might be called a social thriller—a creepy, tightly knit suspense film that, on the fly, reveals more about the lives of immigrants in London than the most scrupulously earnest documentary. Hounded by thuggish immigration police, the illegals also become the prey of their London employers, who take a risk by hiring them and then exact a price. The movie chronicles the way that exploited people take care of one another, exchanging favors while finding the holes in the porous British welfare system. The National Health Service is particularly useful: Okwe, who turns out to be a doctor from Lagos, becomes a one-man hospital, racing about town madly patching up the immigrant sick and wounded. The movie runs at the breakneck speed of his errands. A man of enormous drive and moral resourcefulness, Okwe is also free—free not to be respectable or quite honest. Chiwetel Ejiofor gives a magnificent performance as this underground warrior; Audrey Tautou, however, isn’t quite right—she’s too professionally charming, she overdraws on wistfulness, and at times she seems to have an empty space in her head where her brains should be.
Stephen Frears has quietly built up one of the most formidable of contemporary résumés. He has made at least five great movies before this one: “My Beautiful Laundrette,” “Sammy and Rosie Get Laid,” “Dangerous Liaisons,” “The Grifters,” and “High Fidelity.” Like “Laundrette” and “Sammy,” this movie celebrates the raffish survival skills of people who don’t fit in. Frears and the writer Steven Knight pause for the idiosyncratic moment—the sardonic jokes of a Chinese mortuary porter, the ebullient theatrics of the hotel doorman, a Russian who might have stepped out of a screwball comedy about émigrés from 1937. We are entertained, but we see this squalid world clearly. The great cinematographer Chris Menges keeps the images cool and crisp. There’s no murk, no “atmosphere.” However harried, Okwe the chess player has to anticipate every move as he defends himself and his friends from the treachery on all sides. ♦
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