"Lost in Translation"

Murray's Bob Harris is a huge star, and the Japanese in particular adore him, relishing even his deadpan surliness. The photographer who's shooting the whiskey ad instructs him, in clear but impressionistic English, that he's looking for sort of a "Rat Pack" mood, only of course (since Coppola delights in all cultural differences, not just those readily deemed politically correct) it comes out "Lat Pack." Bob, bemused, adjusts himself in his chair accordingly: "Joey Bishop, would you like?" he asks, knowing that the joke will sail over the photographer's head, but unable to resist making it anyway.

Early on, he threatens to explode the picture, and I'm talking physically: Coppola and Acord move the camera in so close to Murray that he almost bursts out of the frame, an ungainly Godzilla plopped down in the middle of a petite, orderly country. Then Coppola shows him in an elevator, a very tall man towering above the bobbing heads of a mini-sea of Asians. It's a stunning visual joke: Both literally and figuratively, Bob Harris is big in Japan.

Charlotte is sized much more to scale. When she sets out from the hotel in her boyish, preppy, no-nonsense clothes, she's like a schoolgirl on holiday; even with her resolutely American features, she hardly looks out of place. And yet Johansson shows us the nameless discontent that's like a rumble of thunder inside Charlotte. Despite the difference in their ages, their circumstances, their everything, Charlotte and Bob connect instantly -- it's as if something deep inside each of them is reaching out, with instinctive recognition and relief, for its counterpart in the other.

They spar and flirt with each other: Charlotte has some friends who live in the city, and she invites Bob to tag along on an outing. They end up, drunk and boisterous, taking turns at karaoke. Charlotte, having donned a pink Louise Brooks wig, chooses the Pretenders' "Brass in Pocket," and mimes it, purely for Bob's benefit, and with mock seductiveness that's a transparent mask for the real thing. Bob responds with Roxy Music's "More Than This," a song of Byronically lush romanticism. Murray, as we all know, can't sing -- the song comes out in a cracked warble. But he pulls it from somewhere deep inside him, a place where every note is steady and true and right on the money.

Charlotte and Bob fall together and pull away; their tentative movements connect smoothly to form the rhythm of the movie, and it's like the rocking of waves. One sleepless night, they lie awake on the same bed, chastely, fully clothed, talking. Charlotte's husband has gone off for a few days to shoot a rock band in a nearby city. They talk of things that are simultaneously ordinary and gargantuan: Marriage, children, making a living. Bob lies on his back, his body a straight line; Charlotte lies alongside, curled up and facing him, her toes just touching his leg, as if that one small connection point meant everything.

It's a visual hint of the picture's quiet but devastating conclusion -- a moment between characters that's so private, we're not even allowed inside it. But we can see their faces, which tell us all we need to know. In that instant, Coppola and her actors redefine the meaning of the word "lover" -- a lover, we realize, is anyone who loves. The connection between Bob and Charlotte, as Coppola shows it to us at the end of "Lost in Translation," is a moment of intimate magnificence. I have never seen anything quite like it, in any movie.

Many critics and faithful filmgoers often mourn that now long-lost golden age of moviemaking, the '70s, when young directors like Robert Altman, Brian De Palma, Hal Ashby and, of course, Francis Ford Coppola, were stretching the boundaries of what mainstream movies could be. Those days are over. It's not that terrific movies aren't still being made; it's simply that it takes more digging to find them, and no corner can ever be overlooked. Good movies are scattered here and there. There's no wave of bright young filmmakers, working independently and yet unwittingly in tandem, to forge a body of astonishing pictures that will go down in history.

But there's hope in Sofia Coppola. Her movies may not be exactly mainstream (at least not in today's terms), but they're certainly accessible -- there's art to them, but no artiness. And, even more important, no artifice.

If there were more young filmmakers like Coppola, we'd have a movement. As it is, though, we just have a director whose career will be a thrill and a pleasure to watch, and that in itself is no small thing. "Lost in Translation" is such an intimate movie that it feels strange to call it great; physically speaking, its scale is as epic as the human heart is small.

But then, what is an epic but a map of the unmappable? Sofia Coppola works on a seemingly small surface, and yet the emotional landscapes she surveys are as expansive as the ocean. She's not just the progeny of a great filmmaker, but the heir to a tradition. She's our own mini '70s revolution.

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