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Due to Lost in Translation’s enormous success, Bill Murray is now seen by many as Bob Harris. So much so that there’s plenty of people on movie forums that keep asking if this is Lost in Translation, part 2. I hate to disappoint but Jim Jarmusch is man and Sofia Coppola … is that girl from Godfather III.

Broken Flowers won the Jury award at Cannes which is just one of many for Jim Jarmusch. I saw his heavily decorated Mystery Train a year ago and some of the same themes appear in Broken Flowers. The protagonists in his movies are often outsiders who seek (and find) solitude. In his own words:

I am interested in the non-dramatic moments in life. I’m not at all attracted to making films that are about drama. A few years back, I saw a biopic about a famous American abstract expressionist artist. And you know what? It really horrified me. All they did was reduce his life to the big dramatic moments you could pick out of any biography. If that’s supposed to be a portrait of somebody, I just don’t get it. It’s so reductive. It just seems all wrong to me.

Broken Flowers is a minimalist comedy presented as mystery thriller. The movie opens with Don Johnston (Bill Murray) watching a black-and-white version of Don Juan. This sets the first scene where his latest “girlfriend”, clad in pink leaves him. Pink is important in this movie. A mysterious pink letter arrives shortly after. It’s like a Hitchcock’s McGuffin – an object that drives the characters but is not central to the story itself.

Don reads the letter which basically says he has a son. The mystery is who’s the woman who wrote it. Don seems unmoved at first but then his neighbor, a wannabe detective starts prodding him towards finding the truth. His son is supposed to be 19 which narrows it down to 4 women (well, five but one of them died).

Don sets sails for a road trip that takes him through four potential mothers for his son: Laura (Sharon Stone), Dora (Frances Conroy), Carmen (Jessica Lange), and Penny (Tilda Swinton). The interactions are mostly brief and uneasy for Don. You start wondering what it is about him that women like.

Jarmusch has written the part with Bill’s strengths in mind. If you’ve liked the Bob in Lost in Translation, you’ll like Don too. The performance is unemotional and reserved with flashes of Don’s vulnerability.

The ending has been subject to much discussion. It’s open and encourages the viewer to explore different scenarios. Here’s what Jarmusch said:
It’s great that the audience have their own different takes on what they have just seen, and don’t know all the answers. Often, I don’t know all the answers either.

The movie is dedicated to Jean Eustache, a French filmmaker who focused on “desire and despair”. It shares certain elements with other movies from the French New Wave, like Truffaut’s The 400 Blows. All in all, Bill Murray is on roll – following Lost in Translation with an interesting movie like Broken Flowers.