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BY PETER KEOUGH
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Francis Coppola perfected a style of moody, existential filmmaking in his 1974 masterpiece The Conversation and then seemed to abandon it. Maybe he bequeathed it to his daughter Sofia, who more than comes into her own with her second film, one that approaches her father’s mastery of tone, detail, and rhythm and is damned funny as well. Which it would have to be with Bill Murray in the cast and apparently extemporizing at will as Bob Harris, a waning Hollywood film star who’s in Tokyo to shoot an ad for Suntory whiskey (as did Orson Welles, notoriously, in the ’70s). Had a less dadaistic comic mind taken on the sometimes slapstick culture clashes involving encounters with Japanese masseuses, karaoke bars, card-wielding business men, and samurai-style commercial directors, Translation would no doubt have been too literal. As it is, Murray’s Bob complements nicely Scarlett Johansson’s very serious Charlotte, who shivers with nascent but unfulfilled revelation while perched on a windowsill high above the streets or picks her way through the cherry-petaled emptiness outside a Buddhist temple. Both are having marital difficulties — Bob’s wife’s faxed communiqués are one of the film’s few sophomoric lapses, and the growing gulf between Charlotte and her callow, go-getter photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) seems as if it might be drawn from Coppola’s own marriage to wunderkind Spike Jonze. But the idyll of Bob and Charlotte is erotic, not sexual, and it’s touching and hilarious, a tour de force for both actors. As for the director, she even has her own idiosyncratic, auteurial motif — lingering close-ups of Johansson’s butt. (105 minutes) At the Boston Common, the Harvard Square, and the Chestnut Hill and in the suburbs.
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