Modern Classics: The Fragile Poetry of Sofia Coppola’s ‘Lost in Translation’
The American filmmaker’s movie quickly became an instant classic, capturing the unlikely friendship that forms in Japan between a seasoned actor and a much younger woman. With Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson.
In Stranger Than Paradise, Jim Jarmusch’s now-canonical film, three young people stare out at what seems like an overwhelming landscape and manage to see nothing but fog. Something similar unfolds in Lost in Translation, Sofia Coppola’s delicate and quietly moving film. Lost in Translation is not a movie about Tokyo, not even about Japan, and certainly not about Japanese culture. It’s a film about two drifting souls—lost, yes, but in their own lives, in their own bodies.
In its own way, Tokyo’s sensory strangeness becomes a metaphor for the confusion weighing on two people who appear, at least on the surface, to have little in common. Bob Harris is a fifty-something actor whose big moment came in the 1970s and who now survives by earning obscene sums shooting whiskey commercials in Japan. Charlotte is a recent college graduate in her early twenties, tagging along while her husband—an in-demand celebrity photographer—works.
Tokyo’s streets, cluttered with unreadable signs; its customs, striking to Western eyes; and the brutal time difference with the United States all turn the city into an inner map of these characters. At first, they can’t tell what world of signals they’re standing in. Slowly, though, they begin to translate that impossible map into a clearer one: a map of restrained feelings and discreet emotions, of affection and intimacy. A more legible map—one that allows meaning to return.
The film feels more influenced by certain strains of Asian cinema than by American filmmaking. The long silences, the sense that objects, spaces, and glances carry more weight than words, bring it closer to the poetic sensibility of In the Mood for Love than to anything typically associated with Hollywood. Coppola builds a small elegy for those who can’t quite find their place in the world, who live lives that don’t fulfill them, and who see no obvious way out of their confusion.
It’s no coincidence that maps appear everywhere in the film. Once Bob sheds his advertising obligations—something that takes up the first half hour, the most overtly comic stretch, with Murray brilliantly struggling to adapt to his hosts’ demands—and begins running into Charlotte at the bar of the luxurious Hyatt, the city itself takes center stage. She gets lost staring at a subway map, sends a faxed map to find a party, and spends time listening to self-help CDs that talk about “the theory of the inner map.”
Within that inner map—something like a cross between Joe Dante’s Innerspace and David Lean’s Brief Encounter—Bob and Charlotte begin to move. They venture into the wild nightlife of the Ginza district and sing karaoke. She delivers a sensual version of “Brass in Pocket” by The Pretenders; he offers a painfully moving, slightly ruined take on Roxy Music’s “More Than This” (“More than this, you know there’s nothing”). She travels to Kyoto and attends traditional ceremonies but feels untouched by them. Together, they watch La Dolce Vita on TV. He sleepwalks through hotel corridors, the pool, the gym. He suffers because his daughter won’t talk to him on the phone, listens to his wife complain, and mentions that when he gets back he wants to eat healthier—Japanese food. “So why don’t you just stay there?” she replies, acidly.
Coppola finds, in this series of Polaroids turned into cinema, moments that land subtle yet precise emotional blows. We know very little about the lives of these two accomplices, yet it’s impossible not to be moved when Charlotte tells a friend on the phone that she doesn’t know who she married—and then breaks down crying as the friend barely listens. Or when Bob, lying in bed, talks about how his children changed his life until it became almost unrecognizable.
Bob and Charlotte’s relationship is, essentially, a platonic romance. But it goes beyond physical contact—aside from a kiss, a hug, a whispered secret, a touch that confuses them (and us)—to become an encounter between sensitivities. Two kindred spirits recognizing each other despite their obvious generational gap.
Murray carries Bob’s weariness on his shoulders and never patronizes the character or winks at the audience, as he so often does elsewhere. At first, Bob’s inertia fuels laughs drawn from cultural differences (and differences in height). By the end, though, Murray turns him into a melancholic antihero—an existentially alcoholic figure, but one tentatively renewed by hope.
Charlotte—played by a very young, then almost unknown Scarlett Johansson—lights up the screen with her open face, her sadness, and a body slightly fuller than early-2000s Hollywood standards allowed. “I don’t know who I am,” she tells Bob during one of those long, sleepless nights. “You’ll figure it out,” he replies. “The more you know who you are and what you want, the less you let things upset you.” By the film’s end, both of them have begun to walk that long road.
