HALFWAY THROUGH LOST in Translation, it's clear director Sofia Coppola misplaced something other than language somewhere in the air between LAX and Narita. She obviously lost the plot (what glassine, paper-thin bits of it existed, by all accounts) and decided instead to just leave the camera running on her assembled beautiful or amusing characters-slash-objets – a preppily lush Scarlett Johansson, the sleek playground of Tokyo's Park Hyatt, and a resigned Bill Murray – hoping they'd provide the in-flight impromptu entertainment.

Maybe in a perfectly art-directed world, they would suffice to fill the pretty vacant spaces of this barely outlined tale. But that's assuming we're as easily amused by Lost in Translation's 105 minutes of good-looking images and vacuous chitchat as we are by sound bites about celebrity cribs. That's assuming we've never glimpsed the sci-fi Tokyo skyline, tried our hand at karaoke, or followed Murray as he navigated a real, meaty part. Instead, Coppola succumbs to the same mistake made by pop stars who get lazy, believe their own hype, and decide everyone can relate to songs about their distorted experiences – namely riding buses like cowboys, taking bad trips at sundry Hotel Californias, and coping with maddening baby mamas.

It's no surprise, then, that the inward-looking Lost in Translation opens with perhaps one of the largest, more lingering images of a female booty ever lensed for another woman. Are we supposed to kiss the poshly clad, affluent arse or are we just supposed to join her in the foxhole? Thankfully we move on to Bob Harris (Murray), arriving in Tokyo, jet-lagged, disoriented by the city's neon blare, and bewildered by the enormous billboards sporting his own suave self. He's there to hawk whiskey. To make matters worse, he can't sleep, can't speak Japanese, and has a faceless, haranguing wife waging a campaign of passive-aggressive terror against him, firing off faxes about his children's missed birthday parties. When he's not in the throes of a full-blown midlife crisis, Bob is hustled from commercial shoots to photo sessions to hallucinatory TV talk shows.

He's a classic fish out of water – ready to be served up like sashimi to a sweet, sexy young thing like Charlotte (Johansson), who's languishing in J.Lo-style sweater and panties elsewhere in the hotel like an overripe Eloise. Also sleepless in Shinjuku, Charlotte is coming down with a bad case of postcollege aimlessness, and she's tagging along with her spaz photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi), who's too friendly with young actresses for Charlotte's comfort and too focused on his own career to pay much attention to his bride. So Charlotte spends her days staring out the window, decorating their minimalist-chic suite with faux cherry blossoms, and discovering all the well-worn clichés of expat life in Japan – the juxtaposition of Shinto temples and kimono-clad wedding parties straight outta the Meiji era with hyperfuturistic talking billboards and ultra-edgy nightlife. Bob and Charlotte meet mute in the hotel elevator and the bar before embarking on a set of low-key, boredom-relieving adventures: going barhopping and partying in karaoke booths with the natives, eating shabu shabu, and forging an intimacy that seems that much more intense because they appear to be the only ones in the hotel who hear the dreamy, downbeat Jesus and Mary Chain songs on the soundtrack.

Despite a few comedic, and borderline offensive, moments when Murray resorts to jokes that hinge on his misunderstanding of Japanese people's accented English ("Lip my stocking?" Bob asks, both mystified and condescending, when a modern-day geisha asks him to rip her hose – though he certainly does his share of ho-ing for his quadrillion-yen endorsement deal), Lost in Translation boils down to a kind of love story, one that turns – spoiler alert – disappointingly romantic and climaxes with a chaste kiss that is likely to make present and former young women wince as they did during Ghost World or any number of Clint Eastwood or Harrison Ford flicks that pair weathering hunks with young, fresh female flesh. Why force the strained, painful lack of chemistry between Murray and Johansson?

Perhaps Coppola can be forgiven for thinking, in the well-upholstered womb of the Park Hyatt, that style – not love – might conquer all. It worked for her when she adapted someone else's material for her first film, The Virgin Suicides. Here, however, she ransacks some of the more restrained moments of French new wave with leisurely shots of cogitating characters that evoke Eric Rohmer and latter-day Jean-Luc Godard. Yet again that transplant doesn't quite translate. Coppola actually comes closer to making a commercial for celebrity lifestyles of the rich and boring than matching those filmmakers' searching originality and intellectual and emotional depth. Those respectable reference points on a pop- culture map are meaningless when superimposed over the general thought vacuum of Lost in Translation.