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Lost in Translation (2003) More at IMDbPro »

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There's more than one way to find yourself . . ., 20 January 2004

Author: Chris Docker (eyeforfilm) from Scotland, United Kingdom

There's more than one way to ‘find oneself', but many of them involve taking oneself away from the slipstream of daily life, the never-ending succession of familiar things, faces, events and corresponding thoughts – the sum total of which we often, for shorthand, think of as ‘our life'.

Crossing the desert alone, quite literally, or spending hours in meditation, are two ways of going to a place where one becomes intensely aware of one's own limitations, one's own ‘self.' Another is immersing oneself in a traumatically alien culture.

This is exactly what director Sofia Coppola's characters do in Lost in Translation – although hardly with that intention.

Bob (Bill Murray) is a film star who has been paid a huge sum to go to Japan to endorse a whisky. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is a young philosophy graduate who is accompanying her photographer husband. Both are fish out water, isolated by their own sincerity and the barely intelligible culture gap, and trying to make sense of their lives.

The film is adept at avoiding clichés. Much is left unsaid. The inner struggles of the characters are portrayed more in what they don't do/say than what they do do/say (although some suitably deep ideas penetrate the silences and underline the substance of what is going on). Moreover this is a rare glimpse of modern day Japan – from the high-tech intensity of Tokyo to the more tranquil beauty of Kyoto. Instead of being thrown into a mythical past or mad kung-fu scenes, we are confronted with the incomprehensibility of institutionalised karaoke, picture menus in restaurants that convey little about the food (often the photos are photos not of the food but of plastic mock-ups of the food), hectic TV that seems almost a caricature of itself, vigorous but ill-informed attempts at Western politeness, and very wordy sentences that somehow get condensed into a single phrase when ‘translated'.

The characters reactions to all this are very much like my own were on my two or three trips to Japan. In spite of its attempts to learn western ways, it is one of the most culturally isolated countries in the world. If anything, the alienness of Japanese life is toned down in the film, not exaggerated. After a while, you just feel like crying out for something, anything, that is vaguely western, vaguely recognisable.

This incongruous setting is the backdrop for a moving tale of a sensitive friendship between two strangers. Nothing is polished up to make it more entertaining: the realism of the engaging characters, who come to realise that less in their lives can be more, makes it a major cinematic achievement. It is not mainstream, but many audiences will be deeply moved, and rightly so.

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