Sofia Coppola Voted This Must-Watch Movie The Best Romance Of The 21st Century

The New York Times recently released its ranking of the 100 best movies of the 21st century so far. While not everyone was happy with the list (in part because the picks weren't as international in scope as they could've been), it's hard to argue with each individual movie they chose. Ranked #4 on the list was "In the Mood for Love," a 2000 romance film directed by Wong Kar-wai. 

Sofia Coppola was among the filmmakers who chose "In the Mood for Love" as one of the 10 movies on her ballot, and the film's entry on the list quotes her reasons for including it. "It really blew my mind that you could make films in that way, as a poetic medium that doesn't have to spell everything out," Coppola wrote. "It felt like something I hadn't seen before and it was really inspiring to make things that were more impressionistic."

It makes sense that Coppola loved this movie so much, since her 2003 film "Lost in Translation" scratches a similar itch. Both movies are about two people who clearly have a connection but who can't (and perhaps shouldn't) ever become an official couple. Both are quiet, aching films about loneliness and simmering tension, and both would end up on the NYT's list of best ever movies. ("Lost in Translation" was ranked 30th, and received a shoutout from Pamela Anderson.) 

Coppola's been open about loving "In the Mood for Love" over the years, even giving Wong Kar-Wai a shoutout in her acceptance speech when she won an Oscar for the screenplay. After thanking her friends and family, she thanked "the filmmakers whose movies inspired me when I was writing this script: [Michelangelo] Antonioni, Wong Kar-Wai, Bob Fosse, [Jean-Luc] Godard, and all the others."

As Coppola notes, "In the Mood for Love" was unique in how little it would spell things out. The movie is about two married people who start an emotional affair after finding out their spouses are cheating on them with each other, but we never actually see their cheating spouses. Sometimes you'll hear them in the background of an early scene, or you'll see the back of their heads, but for the most part the focus is entirely on the main two characters, Chow Mo-wan (Tony Leung) and Su Li-zhen (Maggie Cheung). 

The relationship between Mo-wan and Li-zhen is remarkably restrained. They never actually make a move on each other, yet their desire for each other is often overwhelming, and the film quietly makes the case that these two are soul mates whether they acknowledge it or not. 

At first glance, "Lost in Translation" seems less subtle. The specifics of Charlotte's (Scarlett Johansson's) troubled marriage are shown pretty clearly in the first act, and the budding relationship she develops with Bob (Bill Murray) does indeed culminate in a kiss at the end. The kiss is one of the more controversial parts of the movie, mainly because some viewers see it as explicit confirmation that their relationship was romantic or sexual, when they'd have preferred to see it as a purely emotional one. Others have argued that the kiss is still fairly innocent, and it hardly undermines the rest of the movie's focus on two lonely people who find a much-needed pure connection during a difficult period in their lives. 

But whereas the kiss might've seemed too explicit for some, that final scene also featured one of the more ambiguous moments in the film: when Bob whispers something into Charlotte's ear. The film makes the bold choice to not tell us what he's saying, to let this intimate moment be something only the characters are privy to. In a 2022 interview, Coppola offered her take on the final scene, clarifying that she never actually wrote any line for Murray in the script and that he wasn't whispering any real words on set. As she explained:

"It came from the tradition of Italian movies — they would just say numbers and figure out the dialogue later. [But] then we left it. We never seemed to be able to sum it up. I always liked that Bill Murray says it's between the two of them. [Everybody] asks what he whispers to her. I just don't get why it's such a thing, but I'm touched that people feel connected to it."