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Lost in Translation
review by Elias
Savada, 12 September 2003
Toronto International Film Festival 2003
Poignant
Sofia
Coppola's second feature treads tangentially along the isolation and
depression themes that encompassed The
Virgin Suicides, her debut film, which deconstructed the family
unit within the confines of a maximum-security household. It's
actually much closer in tone to Doris Dörrie's little-seen 2000
effort Enlightment Guaranteed
(Erleuchtung Garantuert), which followed two German brothers culturally adrift in Japan, even
covering the some of the same footsteps and territory in the
Land of the Rising Sun.
Lost
in Translation
is a more engaging and spontaneous production for Coppola, albeit
one with the same low-key cinematic approach. The semi-sweet film
feels like a continuous slide show of cinematic snippets showcasing
two sleepless Americans -- Bob Harris (Bill Murray), a once-popular
Hollywood actor in the 1970s now reduced to shilling whiskey in a
far-off, Oriental galaxy, and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson),
a young Yale-educated wife of a self-involved commercial
photographer (Giovanni Ribisi)
to the rich and famous, who drags her along on a business trip and
then dumps her, alone, in the Park Hyatt Tokyo -- who share life's
restlessness as their souls and paths intertwine. Lost,
a film and title with obvious multiple definitions (culturally,
socially, romantically -- in a unconsummated, Brief
Encounter, way) offers snippets of the two leads, individually
and together, as they cope with the strange world around them. The
film does have a linear story in a week-in-the-life sort of way, but
you could easily re-edit scenes within the film and get the same
effect.
Bob,
caught in a clinical case of mid-life crisis, half-heartedly wants
out of a twenty-five-year marriage, whose long-distance
conversations with his at-least-I'm-trying wife border on emotional
incompatibility. "Do I need to worry about you, Bob? she
wonders. "Only if you want to," he responds, hoping she'll
take the hint and maybe release him from marital and family
responsibilities. Charlotte fights back tears of depression with a
happy face of makeup and strolls about the neon-encrusted city, but
her smiles are few. Despite being in a civilized and well-populated
metropolis, both appear to be suffering from emotional and cultural
distress, hoping for solace within each other and perhaps wishing
for a Big Life Change. Their mutual insomnia finds them sharing
drinks and smokes and more drinks and smokes at the hotel lounge
bar, drawing deeper into wispy and honestly frank conversation about
their lives and the relationships in which they have entangled
themselves.
It's
a quite charming, disjointedly entertaining piece, with Coppola
spicing it up with some wispy visual and verbal contrasts: Murray
towering about the Japanese in an elevator sequence, or trying to
get a more succinct translation from a Japanese director spouting
sentences of Japanese instructions at home for a television
commercial, yet all his gets from his translator is that he should
look at the camera "with intensity." There's a hilarious
bit with a ditsy Japanese hooker and another with a crackpot
television host (think Chris Tucker from The
Fifth Element). Karaoke (would you believe Murray
"singing" Roxy Music's More Than This?) and hospital waiting rooms also make for some
additional enlightenment.
Murray's
subdued acting makes it one of his most enjoyable roles, rivaling
that as Mr. Herman J. Blume in Rushmore.
Of course, with Murray, the comedy comes in all shapes and sizes
(and ghosts), and his dramatics roles (Razor's
Edge) are generally forgotten. Here we see his softer, matured
side to great advantage. Johannson, who has tended to score well in
the dozen or so films you may have spotted her in, shines as the
young wife stuck in a lonely situation, yet daring to show her more
graceful side. In a bit part, Anna (Scary
Movie) Faris is an up-and-coming American actress and close
(perhaps too close) friend of Ribisi's character, who gives
empty-headedness new meaning as she talks of her inane similarities
with Keanu Reeves, with whom she has starred in a film she is
promoting in Japan.
Lost
in Translation is
a poignant, curious tale of jet-lagged souls searching for a cure
for life's ills. They may not find the right medicine to get on with
their lives, but there's a lot of charm and detail for them; hope
for better days.
Toronto International Film Festival Coverage:
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