(Ed. Note: This was originally published at Matthew’s House Project.)
Bob: Can you keep a secret? I’m trying to organize a prison break. We have to first get out of this bar, then the city, and then the country. Are you in or you out?
Charlotte: I’m in.
One of the first shots in Sophia Coppola’s latest film, Lost in Translation, is of a giant Japanese billboard featuring two neon Japanese characters centered by an electric blue explosion of light. These characters hang in space for a moment as empty signs, totally unintelligible to the audience. They are a microcosm for a world that certainly makes sense to others, but to us begs for translation.
But they are beautiful, and so is Tokyo in all of its sweeping urban complexity. Coppola’s last film, The Virgin Suicides, successfully envisioned a dreamy suburban landscape against which a perfectly understated drama wove itself through a careful attention to the expression and the gesture as a means of dialogue and emotion. Its innovative ambience was crafted through an almost surrealist perception of color and spatial interaction that Coppola is uniquely able to conjure out of commonplace sets. In the same way, the Tokyo of Lost in Translation is more of a space the story occupies rather than a backdrop for the dialogue.
Somewhere in this unsettling semiotic concatenation that is urban Japan is Bob Harris, most probably the very character that Bill Murray was created to play. Bill Murray’s slightly off-center comedy has come to its own in Wes Anderson’s last two featuresRushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums, perfecting his ability to bend reality in just the right place with razor-sharp timing. Here his reserved absurdities fit Bob like a glove.
Bob is a washed-up, mediocre, middle-aged, movie actor in Tokyo on a $2 million contract for a Japanese whiskey advertising campaign. The few days he has spent there have either been in isolation at the bar, alone in the confusing privacy of his hotel room, or being shuffled with a befuddled resignation from set to set. Every now and then we hear from his wife and child, who he apparently does not get along with at all. The strange mélange of rigidly meditative Japanese architecture and the unintelligible cultural chatter of the city force Bob into a catatonia. Everything unfolds before him with the exploitive comedy of the large women he watches doing aerobics in the hotel swimming pool while underwater.
Also a current resident of the hotel is Charlotte, the very young and exquisite wife of an up-and-coming photographer in town to fulfill a few contracts. Though his job is to be a reflexive eye on the world, he doesn’t seem to have any idea of how perfect his wife is. She seems to be having the same experience as Bob, both in marriage and Tokyo. And during the days she is left alone by her husband she spends in her T-shirt and underwear perched in the hotel room window far above the endless city that hardly makes any sense for her at all. Charlotte’s “maturity for her age” is effectively identified when one of her husband’s Hollywood female friends shows up in the hotel to promote her new “film.”
Bob and Charlotte meet in the hotel bar and hit it off over a few scenes of intensely witty dialogue. When Charlotte’s husband travels off to Kyoto for a few days they decide to escape from the city together. Somehow in their episodic tour of Tokyo’s nightlife a certain electricity occurs and Coppola stumbles onto one of the best on-screen romances since The Graduate, The Unbearable Lightness of Being, or Sleepless in Seattle. This is not to say though that Lost in Translation can be reduced at all simply to a love story.
There is a great deal more subtext than that between Bob and Charlotte. Bob’s incomprehensible experience with the Johnny Carson of Japan is set against an inexplicable Japanese admiration for the rough canvas of his very Western face as a media device. Charlotte peeks over the shoulder of a man on the train and catches a glimpse of the ubiquitous anime newsprint porn. Immediately after this she stumbles into a temple during a religious ceremony meaningful to her only in terms of its solemn beauty. Her distinct cultural disorientation drives her back in tears to the phone in her hotel room high above the city, reaching out to find something with the sense of home.
For some reason Bob seems able to handle this dislocation with a sarcastic grace while she is not. And we can see her growth in the film through her relationship with Bob towards the end as she watches a Japanese marriage procession with an understanding gaze.
Coppola has her spending a lot of time in this window gazing over the incredible expanse of Tokyo. Her poetic rendering of the cityscape and its inhabitants feels much like Truffaut’s love of Paris, or Fellini’s of Rome. Lost in Translation is as much a love affair with a city and the process of discovery in interpreting foreign things, as it is the unexpected romance between two marooned Americans. Despite their difference in age and circumstance, Bob and Charlotte find a lot of similarities between themselves with the city as a suggestive backdrop. True relationships are forged through the need to have a point of orientation, as one place that makes sense in the unintelligible network of life.
The film itself thus closes as it begins, as ambiguous and flexible as any situation in which we can’t understand what is going on but don’t really need to.
An implicit irony of the whole story is that nothing throughout the course of the film is lost in translation. The subtext of the utterly human experience shared by Bob and Charlotte resides clearly between the lines of their unspoken similarities and the occasionally comfortable private moment. They are both dissatisfied and they are both homesick, but they don’t even know where home is.
Lost In Translation is about the way people find homes in each other, an experience that in contemporary urban society is a familiar bedrock of meaning. In an endless city filled with what for them are empty signs and meaningless interactions they find a language game of their own to play.