**** (out of ****)
Starring Bill Murray, Scarlet Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi, Akiko Takeshita, and Catherine Lambert
Directed & written by Sofia Coppola
2003
105 min R
Dozen-or-So Best Films of 2003
“Lost in Translation” is a movie that put a mood into me, and a very complex mood at that. It created a combination of feelings that is so unique that now a particular sensation called “Lost in Translation” may always have a home somewhere in my head. It’s hard to tell this early on, but Sofia Coppola’s new film might be like “The Talented Mr. Ripley” or “Raging Bull,” which have left places of bittersweet, inarticulate remorse in me. We meet two people, learn about them, and, in a magic way that doesn’t involve me feeling like I was walking in their shoes, or that I had a lot in common with them, or any other cliché, I came to feel so much for them. The movie does so unsentimentally and without heightened melodrama. What some of the best movies do is to make us feel for other people. They teach us understanding and mercy. If saying they teach us how to be human is too much for you to swallow, then we can at least admit they remind us how.
Two lonely people are at the core of “Lost in Translation.” Charlotte (19-year-old actress Scarlet Johansson of “Ghost World” and “The Man Who Wasn’t There”) is in Tokyo with her photographer husband, who is busy all-day, everyday, with his photo shoot. She walks the brightly-lit streets of Tokyo, wanders into flower-arranging classes, Buddhist temples, and eavesdrops on traditional weddings. Yet she can find no way into Japanese culture. Worse still, as she explains to a distracted friend on the telephone, nothing about the Buddhist temple stirred her. She feels dead inside.
Staying at the same hotel is a washed-up actor named Bob (the legendary Bill Murray). He was once great in the 1970s—in fact, one of the surprise pleasures of “Lost in Translation” is seeing old footage of Murray cut to make him look like the star of “Smokey and the Bandit”—but now he is reduced to making whiskey commercials in Tokyo. He and his wife are “taking a break,” although we’re never quite sure what that means, and he spends day after day in front of cameras trying to understand directors who don’t speak much English. He, too, feels utterly alone.
Their friendship is a beautiful tender one, with distinct phases. It begins with things we’ll tell strangers but not people we really know, then elevates to a kind of jovial buddy-ship. As they went to a party together, I felt the same weird churnings in my guts as when my then-pal, now-wife and I were introduced to each other’s friends. I felt that same anticipation of being with a girl among strangers, of being separated from her at a party, only to have her come back and be sympathetic. Charlotte and Bob discuss their marriages and life in general from the different perspectives of their ages, but only in the most abstract way. The movie is not so much about their talk as about the mystery of intimacy and how we share experiences (theirs, and ours with them). The final stage of Bob and Charlotte is when they realize their separation is imminent. They have no words for what they feel, and they can’t think of the name for the relationship that has formed. Friendship, romance, father-daughter—Bob and Charlotte are all these things, yet none of them.
“Lost in Translation” is filled with great tender moments about how defenseless Bob and Charlotte have decided they are going to be around each other, and at the same time how awkward they are. After the party, she puts her head on his shoulder for the first time and he tries to hide, with an air of casualness, that he doesn’t know what to do. They tacitly agree to not go beyond friendship, to introduce nothing physical to the relationship, but even that is strained. At one point they fight, but they come back to each other. They say what they mean and don’t play any games. There’s a great scene in which she is mad at him, seething with the kind of needy, clingy hatred that we never know to cherish when our loved ones feel that way toward us, but which is so rich when we see it here.
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