Lost In Translation needs no proper introduction. Following the leads of 2001's Mulholland Drive and 2002's Far From Heaven as its respective year’s unequivocal critical darling, reflected in its #1 placement in the Village Voice and Film Comment year-end polls, Lost In Translation is perched in a fairly vulnerable spot all by itself atop the piles of listmaking, which both define and devolve every movie year. Like those two films before it, Lost In Translation has a peripheral interest in abstracting conventional Hollywood narrative forms yet still manages to provide enough accessible emotion so as not to alienate more casual viewers. It’s the year’s requisite bridge between the elitists and mainstream, and thus brings the idea of film as a shared experience to the forefront. Sofia Coppola’s hushed yet streamlined artistry, Bill Murray’s ironic yet soulful detachment, and Scarlett Johansson’s fragile yet self-assured openness all contribute to a film of exquisite contradictions—an aesthetic of hipster removal masks an innate spirituality, a young director sets out to portray youthful disconnect and stumbles upon a study of greying midlife discontent, a romance with no explicit physical connection. Much has been made of Coppola’s dreamlike anti-narrative structure and her drowsy camera’s intimate caressing of actors—yet what’s even more striking is her ability to maintain both dramatic urgency and a deft comic punch throughout. Her 2000 debut The Virgin Suicides seems increasingly like a mere warm-up; in that hazy nostalgic reminiscence through a strictly male-centric eyeline, Coppola announced herself as a dreamer. Here, the dreamer’s gone wandering, and miraculously, people are lining up to grab pages from her diary.

It’s unmistakably Sofia Coppola’s film—despite its passing references to La Dolce Vita and Brief Encounter, it makes no claims on specific film histories or contemporary international cinema movements. Her detractors have dismissed it as a privileged white girl’s travelogue, inward and self-absorbed. This seems to smack of sexism. Many assumed Johansson’s lost, prematurely married post-graduate to be the director’s alter ego, yet Coppola determines from the outset that she is on the outside, looking in. The much talked about but minimally analyzed opening shot—a languidly sensual close-up of Johansson’s rear end in sheer pink panties—firmly establishes a gap between the director and the actress. Coppola has admitted that her first image is somewhat of an homage to Kubrick’s opening shot of Lolita, in which a pre-teen’s toenails are slowly caressed by nail polish. If we take this gaze as vaguely male (and considering her prior film’s conceptual basis, this isn’t far-fetched) then Lost In Translation presents a remarkable sexual equanimity. Perhaps this is Coppola’s greatest contradiction. The glistening lip-gloss sheen of Virgin Suicides, and even Kate Moss’s black-and-white, clinically detached pole dance in her video for The White Stripes’ “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself,” simultaneously eroticize and distance themselves from the female subject. I can’t think of another American narrative filmmaker defined by such dichotomies.

In this case, the ambisexual Lost In Translation is told through the viewpoint of Bill Murray’s martini-dry awkwardness as much as Johansson’s yearning sarcasm. And it’s the comic actor’s persona which threatens to grab the film all for itself; it’s a spellbinding performance, yet in deference to his comic whims, the film nearly collapses early on. The fortune cookie-stale gags directed towards the speech impediment reversals of the L’s and R’s and the mysteries of Japanese cuisine, seem less a product of contemporary language barriers than a desperate kowtow to Murray’s comic drive. His “black toe” joke, which never garnered a laugh at any showing I attended, seems like nothing more than a casual improvised riff—that the throwaway line wasn’t cut from the final product enables Murray to assert himself so prominently in the text that the authorial voice is further blurred between male and female.

Of course, to reduce Coppola’s infinite gifts to the mere acknowledgement of gender identification ignores the film’s delicate grasp of heartrending unfulfilled desire and professional dissatisfaction. The director may have grown up in a particular social stratosphere, but she has reservoirs of moral and philosophical perspective on it. What’s ultimately so moving are the characters’ desires to discover something new and outside of themselves before spoiling, their possible futures reflected in an endless parade of compromised showbiz fools: Giovanni Ribisi’s hipster star photographer husband, Anna Faris’s self-righteously airheaded Hollywood starlet, Yutaka Tadokoro’s antagonistic, impatient Santory Whiskey ad director, Matthew Minami’s demonically toothy talk show host. Coppola’s characters may or may not be politically oblivious, but their glassy-eyed wanderings throughout Tokyo’s Park Hyatt do not mimic the effects of jet lag so much as a more large-scale discontent. It’s that single chaste tableau of Murray and Johansson, lounging together on her hotel room bed, reflected in the large window behind them, that lingers. As they talk of their individual loneliness, their yearning and doubt, they simply float over the distant sparkling lights of the Tokyo nighttime, hovering in a literal space between the interior and exterior, male and female, the social and the private.