Quarantining with Covid (as I am now) may be the perfect way to watch Lost in Translation for the first time, because it’s a movie about people stuck in limbo, a beautiful and charming picture that succeeds on the chemistry of its two leads, Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson.

The implications of that chemistry–and of Johansson’s otherworldly allure–are mildly disconcerting when one considers that she was not yet 19 years old at the time of production, but we won’t be considering those implications because they belong to our time, and Lost in Translation most certainly belong to its time, a time when solitude was still possible, when a place could still be strange and another person could still be a stranger.

One of this film’s many pleasures is its gentle, whimsical sense of disorientation. Murray’s disaffected movie star is never in peril, never driven to despair or frustration; his existence in Tokyo is pampered but slightly askew. He is half a step behind at all times and lacks the will to catch up. The avant-garde theater director Richard Foreman once said that to really know a place one must be a tourist. The same, perhaps, can be said of getting to know oneself.

Director Sofia Coppola evokes a teeming, benevolently dream-like Tokyo. The sprawling, neon-lit modernity, the mountains on the horizon–it gave me visions of sweet home Los Angeles. Murray and Johansson even rub elbows with Japanese surfers and art-scene hipsters, with other American movie stars and hotel-lounge musicians. It’s just like home only not quite–LA if you hit the Pacific and kept going.

Not a whole lot happens in terms of plot machinations, and not much really needs to happen. The story marinates in the winning chemistry of the two lead actors. It’s the kind of movie where the two humans on screen seem to genuinely enjoy each other’s company so much that it becomes infectious, draws you in, exemplifies that truly ineffable quality of movie star charisma–the way you just want to hang out with these people.

Johansson’s performance, like Jennifer Lawrence’s in Silver Linings Playbook, announces the arrival of a major female star. It’s the kind of performance that makes me vaguely embarrassed that I ever took an acting class, tried to write, picked up a guitar. So effortless and natural, of such scintillating magnitude is her presence that it seems futile for one less naturally blessed to even try.

A sort of easy charisma had, of course, been Murray’s forte, although his work in the early aughts, in this film as well as others such as Rushmore and Broken Flowers, marked a maturing of his onscreen persona. More restraint, less smarm, a bit of the sad clown emerging. His rapport with Johansson is sexual but not quite, fatherly but not quite. It’s a perfectly pitched performance by both character and actor–both men movie stars entering late middle age, not exactly rakish but not exactly schlubby.

Guys not quite sure what comes next. Stuck somewhere in the middle.