Lost in Translation (2003)

Director: Sofia Coppola
Writer: Sofia Coppola
Starring: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Akiko Takeshita, Kazuyoshi Minamimagoe, Giovanni Ribisi, Kazuko Shibata

Bill Murray plays a distorted, funhouse-mirror version of himself as Bob Harris, an aging American movie star who has come to Tokyo to film a Suntory whisky commercial—to the tune of $2 million—when he "could be doing a play somewhere." (Coppola, who also penned the script, wrote the role with Murray in mind.) It's easy money, but there's clearly no joy in it. After a day spent receiving bewildering direction in spit-fire Japanese —"Are you sure that's all he said?" he asks his overly concise translator—Bob sits at the bar in the Tokyo Hyatt and tries to avoid conversation with gawking gaijin fans. He's jetlagged, on edge. His wife keeps sending him obnoxious faxes about color swatches for the carpet in his den. He couldn't care less—he's fully absorbed in a mid-life, mid-career crisis. Meanwhile, recent Yale graduate Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is having an early-life, no-career crisis—that is, she has no idea what she wants to do with her philosophy degree. ("I hear there's a buck in that racket," Bob later tells her.) She's in Japan with her rock 'n' roll photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi), who goes off for days at a time on assignment, leaving her to putz around the hotel and occasionally venture out into the city. Charlotte and Bob are both bored, overwhelmed, and wide awake; when they meet at the bar they recognized one another as mutually displaced persons. The instantaneous friendship they strike up would seem unlikely anywhere else, but here—as strangers in a strange, strange land—it makes uncommon sense.

And the resulting relationship is definitely uncommon. The film magnetically resists rom-com cliché. As Bob and Charlotte traipse around Tokyo, the possibility of a sexual, May-to-December relationship hangs around them like electrically charged air. A less thoughtful director would have them hook up, but Coppola realizes that desire withheld—longing, rather than having—is endlessly more satisfying. While the tension between the two is powerful—when they lock eyes in a karaoke booth, when they share an awkward parting kiss in an elevator, when he tucks her into bed—it exists as a kind of volcanic force, surging under the surface of the story. The need these characters fulfill for one another is ultimately not sexual but existential. Charlotte's youth sparks in Bob a realization that he needs a change, and in Bob, the aimless young wife finds fatherly guidance, the reassurance of someone who's been there before. That they meet and share this symbiotic attachment for only the briefest of windows—one crazy week in Tokyo—is a thing of painful beauty and exquisite sadness. Impermanence, imperfection, and restraint are the basis of classical Japanese aesthetics—the cherry blossom is beautiful because it falls so soon, the crack in the clay defines the character of the pot, a pregnant pause says more than a wordy monologue—and Lost in Translation is steeped in these traits like a particularly fine tea.

Which is yet another contradiction. For as much as Lost in Translation is informed by an emotional resonance that is essentially Japanese, its characters view the country through a warped lens of typically American cultural ignorance. Bob is in a state of near-constant bewilderment, and much of the film's comedy is predicated on stereotypical notions of the Japanese as short, unfathomably alien, redundantly polite people who mix up their L's and R's. Some of the jokes are much too broad—as when a high-class call girl, a gift from a Suntory exec, tells Bob to "lip" her stockings— but I think it's unfair to label the film, as some have, as inherently racist. As an American who once lived in Japan, I'll freely admit: there were moments when, at 6'6", I stood out like a sore, blond-and-blue-eyed thumb. There were times when the esoteric code of Japanese etiquette was utterly baffling. I'll even cop to finding it secretly hilarious anytime my co-workers brought up the 2008 elections. (Go on, substitute the L with an R.) I say all that to say this: the characters in Lost in Translation are only in Japan for a few days. They don't have time to see past the stereotypes. They are the aliens here, and the isolation they experience as gaijin—literally, "other person/people"—wakes up the dormant emotions and doubts inside themselves. "I went to this shrine today and there were these monks and they were chanting and I didn't feel anything," Charlotte cries to a friend on the phone. "I even tried ikebana, and John is using these hair products…I don't know who I married." It's basically culture shock as psychotherapy.

It is tempting to view Lost in Translation in personal terms, to see Scarlett Johansson as a Sophia Coppola avatar—unsure of how to escape her father's looming shadow—and Giovanni Ribisi as Coppola's eccentric ex-husband, Spike Jonze. (And, come on, Anna Faris, as the ditzy blond starlet doing a press junket at the Hyatt, is clearly Cameron Diaz.) But I'll leave that to the speculations of Coppola's inevitable biographers. The film stands on its own as a piece of fragile, wryly funny, quietly devastating art. Bill Murray is perfect. He doesn't simply ape his own persona, but rather, builds a character with real depth and nuance. His Bob is wounded and world-wearied, increasingly aimless and unsatisfied. When he jokes with his Japanese hosts, it's with the tired humor of a man who just wants to get through the day. His phone calls with his wife are incessantly awkward—when she asks, "Do I need to worry about you Bob?" he replies, "Only if you want to"—and you get a sense that though he may be a reluctant family man, he loves at least the idea of having a wife and kids. Charlotte just wants to know if it will get any easier —"That's hard," says Bob—and Johannson wonderfully conveys the curiosity, intelligence, and grief of a young woman who has yet to find herself. When the two eventually go their separate ways, parting has never been sweeter sorrow. Bob whispers something in Charlotte's ear and her eyes well up. We don't hear the words, but we don't need to. She's going to be okay.



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