June 26, 2017 Issue

Last week, in response to Richard Brody’s “My Twenty-Five Best Films of the Century So Far” (newyorker.com, June 12, 2017), I posted my own list. For my #1 movie, I chose Sofia Coppola’s wonderful Lost in Translation (2003). Yesterday, reading Anthony Lane’s “Across the Divide,” in this week’s New Yorker, I was delighted to find a reference to Lost in Translation. Reviewing Coppola’s new film, The Beguiled, Lane writes,

Certainly, there is nothing here to match the crisp definition of Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, who, in “Lost in Translation” (2003), stood out so clearly, and with such a funky need for one another, against the jet-lagged atmosphere. That remains Coppola’s finest hour, and, by her standards, the new work is amazingly unhip—touched with a gruesomeness that makes you giggle (“Go to the smokehouse and get me the saw, now”), yet too indolent to summon the energy for camp.

That “with such a funky need for one another, against the jet-lagged atmosphere” is very fine, perfectly capturing Lost in Translation’s bluesy romantic essence.

Other pleasures in this week’s issue:

1. “Goings On About Town: Art: Hilary Lloyd” (“Casually shot videos – of abstract imagery, women, the Adidas trefoil, blossoms – shed ambient light on painterly wallpaper”).

2. “Goings On About Town: Night Life: Wiki” (“Terse, frostbitten beats drag inventive new rhythms from grime and noise influences”).

3. Shauna Lyon’s “Tables For Two: Otway” (“the natural shades of toffee, rhododendron, and sunlight filling the lovely corner space”).

4. Peter Schjeldahl’s “Home and Away” (“Fiction blended with fact generates truths of life as it is lived and felt—or, perhaps, numbly not felt—by so many who labor in the penumbra of wealth. Gomez commands a Vermeer-esque, held-breath aura of transfigured ordinariness”).