Lost in Translation (2003, Coppola)
I had the one in a million good fortune to be able to see this on a 35mm print at Shibuya Crossing in Tokyo. I traveled to Japan because a dear friend invited me along on his pilgrimage to Wrestle Kingdom, the most important event for the largest Japan-based wrestling promotion. The trip caused no small amount of consternation and anxiety, and these emotions exist under the surface of Lost in Translation. It’s a tourist’s film, and not altogether bad because of it. There are a few moments where I thought, yeah, traveling to Tokyo as an American is kind of like that, especially w/r/t extreme, brutal jet lag. For three full days, e.g., I wandered in a state of surreal delirium—barely slept, cried a lot—wondering if I would ever emerge.
Lost in Translation is, however, condescending to the lived Japanese experience, or at the very least indifferent to it: the fact that most of the film takes place in and around a five-star hotel in one of Tokyo’s most heavily visited areas tells me all I need to know in this respect, but there’s one scene, wherein a Premium Fantasy Woman invades Murray’s hotel room and implores him to rip her stocking, that’s positively repugnant. The scene could easily go and the film’s dignity would’ve been that much more intact.
That said, Murray is titanic in this—one of the handful of great performances in all of cinema history, a sadsack for the ages and one to rival the benchmark set by Paul Giammati in Sideways (which came one year later, and therefore likely influenced by Murray here). Can’t overstate how nice it is to see him again. Watching this in Tokyo is like waving to a friend from across a 20 year gap.
Yet the Japan depicted here—this was not my experience. I met incredible people who were as curious about me as I was about them; had wonderful conversations about happiness, spirituality, and pop culture; I left feeling more connected to the world, not less. But Lost in Translation does know what it’s like to be depressed and socially awkward in a big city, and does capture it; maybe even romanticizes it.
It’s undeniable that Coppola codifies here an aesthetic that would go on to adorn the bedroom walls and Discmans of teenagers across the United States. The central relationship here is not between Murray and Johansson: while Murray and Johansson do seem to get along, there’s nothing really keeping them together aside from the novelty of being strangers in a new place. No, The central relationship here is between Coppola and Tokyo. Anxious and euphoric in equal measure, there is difficulty communicating--not only to people who speak another language, but to spouses and friends, which should come as no surprise considering the movie's title--yet also extraordinary opportunities for introspection, like when Johannson's Charlotte takes a day trip to Kyoto.
I too spent a lot of time lost in thought, worrying at times if I made a faux pas, or at others crying tears of gratitude that I could travel to such a far and incredible place. But Murray’s Bob Harris, a disgruntled Hollywood has-been, has the expresses his feelings another way. He leans in to the faux pas, the offensive joke, the disgruntled sigh, and Coppola as director does nothing to combat it. Homay King put it well: “When Japan appears superficial, inappropriately erotic, or unintelligible, we are never completely sure whether this vision belongs to Coppola, to her characters, or simply to a Hollywood cinematic [imagination].”
I had similar feelings while watching. When it’s difficult to determine what, exactly, the POV is, that signals a misstep to me. The L and R thing is a good example. Bob certainly derides the Japanese for the confusion, but is it the character’s racism or the film’s? One Japanese man I met made a joke about it, saying, “we eat lice, not lice” and pointed to his head. It’s a self-deprecating joke that invites you in, of which the movie has none. Everything is at a distance in Lost in Translation, even intimacy.
Can't deny that the vibes are right, though—of course the first thing I did walking out of the theater was put on my bloody valentine as I stumbled onto the very streets where the movie had been shot. My friend and I were texting and he dropped quite a great line: “Funny, after one day it felt like we had been here 10 and after 10 days if feels we were here for but a moment.“ At its best, Lost in Translation captures this feeling. It is a warm and melancholy one indeed.
