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"Mysterious? Okay, I'll just think, where the hell is the whiskey?"

Someone smart once told me that you can't have sex with your soulmate. Can't marry her or him either, obviously. Once you consummate the relationship, the spell is broken. Your soulmate is your guardian angel, someone who understands you on a level that no lover or spouse ever can, someone to whom you are connected on an otherworldly level, someone with whom the word "inhibition" means nothing. But the relationship is destined to remain platonic.

Sofia Coppola's joyous and heartbreaking Lost in Translation is a profound exploration of this concept in particular, and of loneliness and friendship in general. A walking dichotomy, it is absolutely one of the funniest films of the year, and also one of the most deeply sad; both life-affirming and utterly defeatist. The presence of these disparate elements somehow does not result in a matter/anti-matter explosion, but in a sort of elegant, almost supernatural harmony. Come to think of it, that was also the case with Coppola's debut work, The Virgin Suicides. The woman knows how to work with contradictions.

Have you ever traveled alone to a place where you have no friends or acquaintances? It can be horribly, depressingly, suicidally lonely. As Lost in Translation opens, Bob Harris (Bill Murray), a popular but aging actor, arrives in Tokyo to film a series of whiskey commercials. He is greeted at the hotel by a group of fawning but glaringly artificial lackeys who give him presents, send him to his room and send him a very energetic prostitute who tells him to "lip her stockings."

The next day, he is escorted to the set of the commercial, where the director proceeds to spout a very long tirade in Japanese, which is translated to Bob as "look at the camera, with intensity," and later, "look mysterious." Bob is bothered by the fact that the glass he is holding contains iced tea, not whiskey. This scene is almost inappropriately funny, and by that I mean grasp-your-groin-and-fall-out-of-your-chair funny. I haven't laughed that good and long in a while.

Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is the bored young wife of a hotshot photographer (Giovanni Ribisi). She runs into Bob in a hotel bar, and they make a connection, perhaps because she doesn't mention his movies or his celebrities (in fact, whether she is even aware that he is famous remains unclear). Bob, by the way, is married, and has tortured, contentious phone conversations with his wife, who seems to be redesigning their house and is constantly asking for his opinion on carpet hues and the like.

In a place where no one speaks his language, both literally and figuratively, Charlotte understands Bob. She gets him. She laughs at his jokes, takes him out for karaoke on the town, and knows just when to make her exit. Their conversations seem to run on forever. Her husband seems to be the equivalent of Bob to his wife, running around furthering his career, never really there when needed, though professing his love at every turn.

A lesser movie -- or, to be fair, a different movie -- would have sent Bob and Charlotte to bed either immediately or as the film's climax, and would then have tried to deal with the repercussions of same. That isn't what Lost in Translation is about. We've been lulled by one toothless love story after another into thinking that every connection between a man and a woman will result in sex and/or an affair. Coppola's protagonists cannot enter into a romance, and maybe it's better that way. Maybe the force of their connection is due to the fact that they have spent a mere ephemeral week in Tokyo together and not a life full of sending kids to school and picking carpet colors.

Bill Murray, in one of his best performances, mixes his trademark snide humor with a sadness and humanity we rarely see from him. He builds a comfortable rapport with Johansson, who continues to choose daring projects while her contemporaries make skateboarding movies and schlock horror. But the story that will emerge from this is Sofia Coppola, who makes us forgive her for The Godfather Part III with two consecutive amazing turns behind the camera.