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Paradise is lost and found
"Lost in Translation" has no answers in a city with no subtitles
By John Behling
Published:
Monday, October 13, 2003
"hi, i had a good time tonight... the movie was very good. i'm downloading songs now from it. too bad i'm at home so it takes forever. mm, if you think about it, it really actually had a sad ending. i mean, not that they should have gotten together cuz they were both married and everything but there was that something special between them. and they just left it."- Kristi Dietz
If a review is to contain the personal reaction of the reviewer toward the film and display a connection between the two, this passage is the best review of Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation" that will ever be printed. What's in this text is the relation between myself and someone I love and a memory and a moment in time and space and a film. What's in this text is how she feels about the film and how I feel about the film and why it should mean anything to either of us. But in printing it here I'm doing nothing to fully translate the effect of that passage. But, this is the trouble with translation.
Sofia Coppola's first film, "The Virgin Suicides" begged for translation. In this prim, psychosomatic transmission, a man reflects on a memory that won't die - a story of six suicides in a dying suburban neighborhood. There are no answers, but in a way we are supposed to believe that there shouldn't be answers.
�In contrast, "Lost in Translation," is a love story that needs no translation. But still doesn't provide us with any answers.
Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is a middle-aged American celebrity contracted to endorse a Japanese Whiskey. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is a newly-wed, philosophy major left to wander her hotel while her husband John (Giovanni Ribisi), a photographer covering a rock band, either sleeps or hurriedly leaves the room. Likewise, Bob's wife is a detached abstraction, communicating through phone calls, faxes and packages. She sends him carpet samples to consider for the floor of his study. She sends diagrams of furniture to ponder. �These are the haunting artifacts of a 25-year-old loveless marriage, typified by a frigid adherence to details.
The two meet and fall into flirtful commiseration, both hoping to escape Tokyo and their spouses, for a life that seems possible, if only in a culture that's impossible for them to understand.
Sitting at the bar, Bob says to Charlotte, "Let's make a prison break. First this bar. Then this city. Then this country." But really Tokyo is their brief escape from America, where their spouses and the rest of their lives are a full-time reality.
Coppola's vision of unsubtitled Tokyo is the result of stripping the audio from a filmed image and then projecting it backwards.
Without comprehension, without familiarity, the setting is able to become the ultimate vehicle for the story, a tirelessly beautiful hallucination where understanding is not necessary.
This Tokyo is viewed from the back of a cab in the middle of the night, sliding through traffic. You're jet lagged, hung over and slouched down. You're alone, miserable, deaf and mute due to the language barrier and you have headphones on. The city is kinetic, beautiful and amazing, but you're very tired and depressed and the language barrier is one more force pushing on your fragile construction of the world. Seen in a reflection from outside the cab, you are barely visible beneath the skin of the city.
Reflected images are at the center of "Lost in Translation." Charlotte rides in a taxi through downtown Tokyo, her face is packed in tightly against reflections from neon signs, barely finding a place in the composition. Charlotte is struggling to discover her place and assert her identity but all she can find is crowded skylines, crowded streets and her own empty hotel room.
Later, a conversation between Bob and Charlotte is cast onto a reflection in the hotel window, making their figures seem like constellations mapped out over Tokyo.
This is their relationship; their connection is as subjective as imaginary lines drawn in the sky. Coppola connects the lines to show us a beautiful couple, but to a different observer it's only isolated points, it's only speculation. Bob and Charlotte are conscious of this shifting perception, switching between the sarcastic world they create together and the reality they must return to.
"Let's form a jazz band," Charlotte offers at one point." Later the two sit across from each other for lunch at a restaurant and no one speaks for a long time. �
Every sequence feels like a daydream, and Tokyo lends itself well to creating a fantasy world. But the point of this is to capture the irrational twists of mind that happen to people in love, the elements that make us seem like we've found the only other person who speaks the same language.
In the end, the characters have become too real to judge. Is it love or some bizarre dream that won't hold up outside of Tokyo?
Both responses faulted due to the subjective nature of translation. Even in dreams, the emotions we feel are real. They are, at least, real in that moment. And what more can we really expect?
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