Sofia Coppola opens Lost In Translation with a shot of a pink-panty clad ass, laid horizontal and looming gigantic on a movie theater screen. One assumes it belongs to female lead Scarlett Johansson, but one can't be sure. It's a startling image, either voyeuristic or outright funny. What does it signify? Intimacy, maybe. The sexiness of not being sexy. Or just the everyday cotton-drawer ordinariness of being lonely in an exotic locale.

Once Johansson starts moping around her hotel room, pressed against a plate-glass window with a jaw-dropping view of Tokyo and listening to books-on-tape that promise to help her locate her misplaced soul ("I didn't feel anything," she complains after dispassionately taking in a religious ceremony, tourist-style, from the back of the shrine) the movie seems headed for the same kind of moony directionlessness that scuttled The Virgin Suicides. With her big lips and sleepy eyes and bored-hipster sensibility, she feels in her early scenes like a clear surrogate for the writer/director herself. Maybe the close-up shot of panties is meant to establish this as a girls' movie. I shift uncomfortably in my seat.

Not to worry. Coppola has something grand and specific on her mind, and she has someone grand to help her realize that vision - Bill Murray, who has aged into not just a grand old sage of American comedy, but also a sort of avatar of melancholy hip, lending a weird dignity to whatever project he graces with his presence. So, silly me, I was ready for Lost In Translation to be a quiet consideration of transcontinental ennui; I wasn't ready for it to be one of the funniest things I've seen all year. I don't know whether Murray was allowed to ad lib, but there's comedy in here that I would have thought Coppola didn't have the chops for. And, as is so often the case, it's the funny stuff in the first reels that earns the right to seriousness exercised later on. When the end credits roll, Lost In Translation has established Coppola's cred as the maker of perhaps the finest cosmic jet lag movie never directed by Wim Wenders.

Despite its small-scale indie pedigree, Lost In Translation is one of those movies that can't possibly make the transition to the TV screen intact. The disorienting and humbling power of the opening sequence, in which Murray stares, slack-jawed, out the window of his limo as the lights of Tokyo - think Times Square in triplicate - tower overhead, would be hard to replicate in a home theater, unless your home happens to have 20-foot ceilings. Shot with a graininess that imbues every image with the quality of a day barely remembered by a foggy mind, the whole film feels like something you might see just after (or maybe just before) you rub the crust out of your eyes.

Turns out this wasn't just an affectation Coppola adopted to put The Virgin Suicides across, and so much the better. She deliberately favors a lush haziness that is the opposite of the crisp specificity currently in aesthetic favor. (If they're not careful, this film will play havoc with DVD compression.) The granular film image, like something drawn from the past of a medium that's in danger itself of being replaced by digital variations, is directly complemented by the selection of noisy, hazy music - by The Jesus and Mary Chain, My Bloody Valentine and others - that is a rough aural equivalent. The use of songs from the 1980s and 1990s lends a palpable nostalgia to the scenes where Coppola expertly deploys them; like All the Real Girls, Lost In Translation plays like a dream half-remembered. (If it's a dream, who's doing the dreaming? Is it Murray's character, blessed with the unexpected companionship of a pretty young woman during his enforced sojourn in Tokyo? Or is it Johansson, desperately in need of some kind of guidance to help make sense of her life?)

The title refers to mental and physical dislocation, of course, but also to a certain incommunicable richness of experience. Yes, Johansson and Murray carry on a gentle romance, but the film never once seems to entertain the notion that theirs is anything but an unsustainable relationship. (OK, there is a moment, in the film's very final reel, where Coppola plays it deliberately coy.) The meaning - random, transitory, revelatory - comes as they try to express themselves to each other, with the younger one asking the older whether marriage ever gets any easier, and the older one trying to verbalize the beautiful, terrible qualities of parenthood. Are they in love? One of the questions the movie tries to work is the one about what love is, anyway. They speak to each other, and that's important.

Coppola has a lot of fun riffing on the notion of a communications gap, both across age and across cultures. An escort dispatched to Murray's room exhorts him, in broken English, "Lip my stockings." (Well, ha ha.) The director and photographer shooting Murray's liquor ads for the Japanese market are demanding something that he can't quite figure out how to provide. On the phone, Johansson tells someone back home that Tokyo is just great as she fights tears and loneliness. Murray gets faxes in the dead of night, and is sent carpet samples by FedEx. Every image on a Japanese menu depicts the same raw meat, just with different prices attached. Etcetera. True happiness is found in a karaoke bar, with Japanese hipsters swaying to and fro in unison as Bill Murray croons "(What's So Funny 'Bout) Peace Love and Understanding." By the time Murray whispers something in Johansson's ear that we're not privileged to hear, the motif is well-established and the conclusion, perhaps, a given. The purest form of communication is the one that passes from my lips to your ears, audible to no one else but the wind.

* It's entirely possible that, if the first film I saw in a theater after spending more than three months laid up and otherwise avoiding public places due to a broken foot and an unexpected stay in the intensive care unit was, say, Gigli, I might give that an A-, too. I'm just sayin'.