Lost In Translation

The context in which you watch a film is everything. The first time I saw Lost In Translation I was on an eleven hour flight across the Atlantic, watching it on a tiny, smeary seat-back TV with earphones that crackled every time we hit the slightest bit of turbulence, and there was no chance in hell I was going to give this meaningful masterpiece the attention it deserved. In fact I think I found it boring and switched off halfway through, instead focusing on the strange rubbery meat-substitute that my inflight meal consisted of.

But fast forward a year to a winter night of insomnia, tucked up in bed and deciding to give the film a second whirl; immediately it struck a cord, if only for the fact that Scarlett Johansson has a mesmerising on-screen beauty, and, like myself, the characters were also suffering from a similar state of insomnia.

I’ve watched the film countless times, often when I cannot sleep, and nearly always alone; I find that the film, the beautiful cinematography and the intricately crafted characters are my comfort in the alien world that exists after 2am, much like Bob and Charlotte find comfort in each other in the alien city of Toyko. It is said that the nights are for the poets and the madmen, and there is certainly something poetic about Lost In Translation.

From the opening scene of Bob awakening in the back of a taxi driving into Tokyo, you are immersed into this dreamlike world; you see the city as only a blurry background montage, and through the reflection of the taxi windows, and then again as you see the cityscape through Charlotte’s bedroom window, an iconic shot from the film that reoccurs throughout. The city is central to the whole film. Coppola herself stated that after a trip to Tokyo she wanted to make a film about the city, “That was really the starting point for the story… I thought, “Oh I really want to film this. I love the way the neon at night looks.”… I never thought about setting it somewhere else.”

And that is exactly what she did with Lost In Translation, she took a city that had nearly always been portrayed as a thriving, technologically-advanced, over-populated metropolis to the Western world and gave it a sense of serenity and romanticism.

Charlotte couldn’t have been played better by anyone other than Scarlett Johansson. Aged just 18 at the time of the films release, Scarlett perfectly portrayed the disillusion and loneliness of coming-of-age. Charlotte, a young wife with a lack of direction, suffers isolation and an overwhelming feeling of insignificance that is only exaggerated through the shots of her walking through the crowded streets, surrounded by skyscrapers, across Shibuya Crossing. She is merely a speck in this huge city; albeit a beautiful, young American speck.

However, she comes to find comfort in a friendship that develops with a ‘washed-up’ movie star, Bob, played spectacularly by Bill Murray, whom she meets at the hotel bar, and bonds with as neither of them can sleep. Much of the movies plot is not driven by the narrative of these two characters, but by the unspoken bond that they share. It’s not love, but it’s something like it.

What significantly makes the story as good as it is is the fact that Coppola doesn’t simply write a sickening love story; Charlotte and Bob don’t make passionate love under the cherry-blossoms by some Japanese temple at twilight and run away together. They have fun, they both mock and admire the different culture, and they have their silent individual despairs that are soothed by being together. It’s that feeling that you’re not as alone as you think you are, not only in this strange city, but in the world. Bob and Charlotte bond a friendship so significant that you feel privileged to be part of it, just watching the movie.

And I am in tears every time I watch the final scene, where Bob whispers those forever sought out inaudible words into Charlotte’s ear and holds her. It’s just the perfect goodbye to the fleeting encounter, the fleeting friendship, that has blossomed onscreen in the past 90 minutes. You just know that if Sofia had wrote dialogue into that scene it would have ruined it, and you are left with the enormous satisfaction that Bob told her exactly what she needed to hear, even though you don’t know what was said.

Lost In Translation is one of those films that is immensely sad but not tragic, it gives you hope but isn’t idealistic, it’s touching and funny, yet austerely ‘real’. Needless to say it is my favourite film, just beautiful. It couldn’t be done in any other way, in any other setting, with any other cast: that makes it pretty much perfect I think!