A movie I've watched four times over the last ten years. Guess it's one of those that just grows on you. It's a fascinating film, maybe for all that's real....all that's not said...all that's felt...just there...just beyond.
Bob (Bill Murray) is an American actor, in Tokyo to shoot an advertisement. Charlotte (Scarlette Johansson) is in the same hotel in Tokyo, with her husband, a photographer, who is out for a couple of days on a photography assignment. It's like two strangers who find something beautiful in an unusual and unlikely reprieve.
She is in her early twenties, and he is in his late fifties, and the whole dynamic is at one time a lot of things... fun, comic, intelligent, sad, romantic.....above all an undeniable connect.
The sequence of Bob shooting the whisky campaign ad with the Japanese team is simply hilarious. Yet there's a sad....a sad in how he is contemptuous of not just the advertisement or the shooting, but of himself too.... only too aware that he is using this as an escape from a marriage that is starting to sour.
Charlotte on the other hand is this sweet, intelligent and thoughtful woman, who seems to be going through a parallel crisis of her own, more like a quarter life crisis, wondering at what she wants to be, what life means, about her marriage......and wondering if it will get better over the years.
The relationship starts through a little eye contact, and then they start hanging out together......karaoke bars, drug parties, mostly the hotel bar......and they are soon sharing their innermost feelings, about their marriages, their fears, their happiness (un), all that deep stuff. You can feel the togetherness...but it's beyond a label.
The three days done, and they don't seem to even know how to say goodbye, because they don't know what they have, what they're saying goodbye to. Yet in the end, Bob runs after her and whispers something in her ear which brings out so much tenderness and joy, something we are not allowed to hear....and can only guess. In fact they become so real, that you'd almost think you were intruding if you heard.
Just the length of my post would give you an idea of how real they became to me :)
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