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Lost in Translation
review by Cynthia
Fuchs, 12 September 2003
Toronto International Film Festival 2003
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The
frame opens on a young woman's sheer pink panties. She's lying on
her side, on a large white bed looking on a wide high-rise window;
with her back to the camera, the long line of her torso is still,
sinuous and graceful. It's only a moment, a hint of privilege and an
invitation to desire, explicit and prepackaged, yet mysterious and
elusive. It's the pop girl made quiet, vague, and not yours.
The
shot cuts to Bill Murray, of all people, arriving at New Tokyo
International Airport: in seconds, he's whisked off in a cab,
immersed in neon and traffic as he sleeps briefly, jetlagged and
bored. In fact, he's not Bill Murray here, but Bob, an action movie
star in Japan, where he's shooting whiskey ads ("For relaxing
times, make it Suntory time") for a couple of million dollars.
En route to the Park Hyatt, he passes his own billboard, and rubs
his eyes as if startled, which he is not.
In
fact, Bob is feeling rather lost, an idea that comes up in repeated
and shifting forms in Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation.
Not only is he not getting the language or the height or the
contacts with his family back in L.A., but they produce not yearning
so much as weariness, and unarticulated questions. His (offscreen,
unseen) wife faxes him, noting that he missed his son's birthday
(adding, "I'm sure he'll understand"), demanding a
decision concerning the new carpet for his study; she sends a box of
swatches, which tumble out onto the floor when he opens the package
as if beyond his understanding. Fine, he mutters, whatever she
wants. When he calls, she's rushed, taking the kids to school. What
does he want, anyway?
This
is the film's question -- what to want and how to want when you
appear to have everything. Famous, rich, selfish: he couldn't be a
less sympathetic character. On a commercial set, he half-smiles with
his liquor glass in hand. "Could you do it slower?" asks
the director, "With more intensity?" Fine. At a photo
shoot, the photographer insists, "I need mysterious face... You
know Lat Pack?" Ah, Bob knows, and contorts his face so it
looks swingy: "Sinatra, ring a ding ding." Less
condescending than exhausted, he seeks someone out, someone with
whom he can have a conversation.
Early
in the film, Bob spots Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson, she of the
pink panties shot) in the hotel elevator. She won't recall him
later, though they're the only Caucasians in this tight package of
suits. But Bob sees her smile at him, a familiar sign, pale and
sweet. What he'll find out later, when the talk, is that Charlotte
is a recent Yale graduate (in philosophy, no less), feeling her own
sort of lostness, as she has little to do in Tokyo with her brand
new husband John (Giovanni Ribisi, who narrated Coppola's delicate
first film, 1999's The Virgin Suicides), a high-fashion
photographer who appears to have no notion of who she is or why
they're married.
They
run at different speeds. After collapsing into bed late at night, he
stumbles off to work in the mornings, on occasion leaving her alone
for days at a time. Later, she'll ask Bob (so not the right person
to ask), "Does it get easier?" When she does tag along
with John, for instance, to post-shoot drinks with a perky starlet,
Kelly (Anna Faris), Charlotte can only feel superior (I mean,
really: Kelly thinks Evelyn Waugh is a girl's name). But even if
Charlotte can't know it, her snooty impatience is less about the
obvious shallowness and compromise that John's life represents than
about her own need to feel recognized, special, deserving.
It's
a small-seeming theme, even commonplace: she feels alienated,
foreign, in another country. Dumped into Tokyo, Charlotte and Bob
meet at the hotel bar, confess their sleeplessness, and smoke
cigarettes. Soon they're sharing sarcastic glances in the hotel
piano bar, exploring the city together, going to clubs, strip bars,
and video arcades, eventually spending an evening into the wee hours
at an apartment belong to Charlotte's friend Charlie (named for a
friend of Coppola's and played by Fumihiro Hayashi). Bob serenades
her with a karaoke version of Roxy
Music's "More Than This." She's
touched, and who wouldn't be?
Their
connection is necessarily fleeting, and the movie doesn't pretend
otherwise. It's not salvation or even resolution that's at issue
here, but rather, investigation, or maybe contemplation. Lost in
Translation is clever and refined; it turns perspective inside
out. It's not a structural inversion, as in Virgin Suicides,
which had the boys imagining the girls, hopelessly missing all so
they might hang onto their imagined vision at all costs, longing for
the rest of their lives. Bob and Charlotte also remain poised rather
than resolved, but their understanding of desire is more
sophisticated, or more jaded, than the collective neighborhood boys.
Bob and Charlotte live with unarticulated loss (no explanatory or
nostalgic narration here), and the movie doesn't fix that for them.
Bob
and Charlotte also see one another, unclearly, which complicates
what you see. Director of photography Lance Acord (who has worked on
movies with Spike Jonze, Coppola's husband) here works with film
(not video), maintaining a muted aesthetic, so the film's evocation
of loss is never acute, but composed, quiet, polished. It's
certainly true that the characters' longing is skewed; they may live
with loss, but they live beautifully, in fine hotels with access to
swimming pools, cabs, and room service. (That said, when Charlotte
takes a day trip to Kyoto, outdoors, observing without speaking or
venturing to connect, the scenes are faster, more colorful, less
sad.)
In
the recent star-making (or more precisely, star-announcing) New
York Times Magazine cover article, Coppola admits that she's
dressed Johansson based on her own tastes: "I know," she
tells interviewer Lynne Hirschberg, "How narcissistic" (31
August 2003). Such performative self-awareness is business as usual
for Coppola, child of two famous filmmakers and sister to another,
Roman (whose 2000 film, CQ also considered the difficulties
of expectation and desire, the timidity that comes with class
consciousness).
Unsurprisingly,
guesses at Coppola's family dynamics have shaped some reactions to
this film as well -- Charlotte's distant marriage, the protagonists'
father-daughter-ish ages, the easy sniping at "Hollywood"
when Kelly shows, up all appear to be recognizable touchstones. But
such easy allusions can also miss what's most interesting Lost in
Translation, which is its evasiveness. Yes, it's about
alienation (the title alone tells you this), and yes, it's about
rich people feeling alienated (the Park Hyatt tells you that).
But
it's about seeing and not seeing at the same time, a series of
incredibly precise, meticulous images of faces and hands and
doorframes, images that brush up against one another so you can
tease out stories, project your own desires. And that's why that
mysterious first shot of the fantastic pink panties is at once so
delicate, so disconcerting and so apparently straightforward. It's
about Americanness, whiteness, and insularity, and it's about
wanting something else.
Toronto International Film Festival Coverage:
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