Fading movie star Bob Harris ( Bill Murray ) arrives in Japan for a big pay day doing a whiskey commercial. There he meets Charlotte, the bored wife of a photographer on assignment ( Scarlett Johanssen ) and the two spend of the rest of the picture alternating goofing on the Japanese and treading lightly around intimate feeling.

Writer, director Sophia Coppola infuses Translation's melancholy bent with some striking imagery, energized editing and carefree nature as the two leads contend with Tokyo neon and culture in basically an action-less film where confusion and monotony is the catalyst. The late night bar scenes at the hotel create an ideal atmosphere for quiet desperation and tempered by Murray's craggy face dead panning evokes Antonionni with a sense of humor. The simmering sexual tension between the two begins to wear thin after awhile though and Coppola's compromising positions and pregnant pauses begin to repeat and fail to move the story forward. The open ended climax informed by an inflated music score and a step up in the emotion department simply fails to register or live up to the film's first hour and Lost just wanders to its mottled conclusion.