Many years ago, the linguist Mario Pei reported in one of his books about an American in Paris who left, in his hotel’s register, a plaintive note to the effect that nowhere in Paris could you find a decent hamburger.

This movie is about two Americans in Tokyo who are thrown together by the fact that (speaking metaphorically [*]) it is impossible to find a decent hamburger in that city.

Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a middle-aged American star of action films, hired for an exorbitant price to do a Suntory commercial in Japan. Stranded (so to speak) in a luxury hotel in an alien city where nobody speaks his language and people’s behavior is often incomprehensible to him, he is thrown into the company of Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a young wife whose husband, a photographer, is tied up in his work so deeply that he has no time for her, leaving her stranded (so to speak) in a luxury hotel in an alien city where nobody speaks her language and people’s behavior is often incomprehensible to her. The result is romance.

The film, however, is “tender and understated”, I believe is the expression, which is movie code for the fact that the less stoic viewer is likely to fall asleep early on. I am stoic, but Angela, who insisted on going to this movie, fell asleep about fifteen minutes into it, and after it was over had to ask me what happened. Fortunately, the reply “nothing much” was fairly accurate.

IMHO the best scene in the film, which happened early on, was the one in which a prostitute, hired by Harris’s employers and apparently chosen for her vast knowledge of American sexual preferences and activities, attempts to seduce a totally uncomprehending (and unwilling) Harris. This lasted for about two minutes, and was about the only place where Murray got to exercise his primary metier as a comedian.

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(*) My friend Joel Brozovsky points out that to find a hamburger in Tokyo all you have to do is look for the golden arches. He admits, however, that this leaves the question of “decent” hanging …