Brittany Murphy told her director she had only ever been hired to play cute or crazy. She doubted she could do anything else. So they established a private code.

He would call out "C1" when she drifted toward cute, "C2" when she tipped into crazy. With this secret language director Robert Allan Ackerman steered her, take by take, toward something that nobody had ever asked of her.

In THE RAMEN GIRL (2008), Murphy plays Abby, an American who follows her boyfriend to Tokyo and is promptly abandoned there, alone in a city whose language she cannot speak.

She wanders into a neighborhood ramen shop, drowns her sorrows in a bowl of soup, and decides on the spot that she will learn to make ramen. The gruff restaurant owner wants nothing to do with her. Neither understands a word the other says.

The film is sweet and earnest, about a woman flailing toward a purpose that everyone, including herself, doubts she can reach.

This was one of the last films Brittany Murphy finished. She died in December 2009, at 32.

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Co-produced by independent studio Media 8 Entertainment and Japan's Digital Site Corporation. Warner Bros. handled its initial theatrical and physical release in Japan, while Image Entertainment managed its distribution in the United States, where it bypassed a wide theatrical run and went straight-to-DVD.