Lost in Translation
Sofia Coppola

Josie Appleton

Coppola's Oscar-nominated film features the days-long friendship between a burnt-out movie star (Bill Murray) and a young graduate (Scarlett Johansson), who meet in a Japanese hotel. The two are stuck in box rooms above the city, pacing their separate floors at night and flicking through TV channels.

They are both in dead-end relationships: Murray’s conversations with his wife focus on the new carpet for his study; Johansson’s photographer husband is an unresponsive idiot. What they have in common is their ‘lost’ bit: being alone, surrounded by foreignness, with no idea what they are doing with their lives.

It is surprising how much can come out of their meeting. There are no events - just a mutual revelation, a sharing of company. This simple contact takes on an intensity that might be more expected from an epic love story. And once they meet, the city is made less foreign – its ways become quirky or exciting, rather than jarring and confusing.

Part of the spark comes from their age gap: she is at the beginning of her career; he is at the end. That they share similar problems indicates that the existential problems people have today continue way beyond the early twenties. She’s looking for answers, wandering into rooms and temples and listening to self-help tapes, as well as approaching him in the bar. Though 30 years her senior, he’s hopelessly inadequate: he can’t give her the guidance she desires, because he’s in the same boat. ‘Does it get any easier?’ she asks. ‘Yes. No’, he equivocates. Such a relationship between older man and young woman might have been fatherly, or seedy. With these two it has an equality and mutuality. The sexual tension therefore works well, even if it would be too much for it to be consummated. It’s only at the end that Murray’s character is able to offer her a lead, when he holds her and whispers some inaudible last words in her ear.

This film stands out for its humane depiction of the experience of alienation. These themes are often addressed in a harsh and relentless manner, so that you wind up feeling both depressed and bored. Lost in Translation director Sofia Coppola uses humour, compassion and a lightness of touch to show their individual lives, and brief union. Her camera has an intimacy and humanity. In sharp contrast to the lead’s appearances in front of the camera advertising whisky, or making a fool out of himself on a Japanese talkshow, Coppola lets her characters be themselves. She allows pauses far too long for a movie, when the characters are stuck for words; she catches Johansson in moments of turning away or sneaking a sidelong glance. Only by keeping our humanity are we able properly to portray existential crisis – both the tortuous experience of being lost, and the latent promise of being found.

See an earlier review of this film from the London Film Festival 2003.