Literally Me: Lost in Translation (2003)
How Sofia Coppola's most famous film explores liminal tourism.
In recent years, loneliness is seen as a health epidemic rather than a simple emotion any individual would have felt at any point during their lives. This year, the Surgeon General in America has declared that the country is facing a public health crisis in loneliness, especially among younger men and women. The issue can be brought about by numerous factors, particularly with the permanence of social media, or the isolating effects felt by the COVID-19 pandemic.
In Japan, loneliness is a close crisis too large to even be mitigated. For decades, the government was concerned about the rise of shut-ins, otherwise known as hikikomori, individuals who live reclusively in their own homes. This became a wider problem, and a governmental body was established to curb it, yet it has not even been effective in reducing it.
In cinema, loneliness can have many applicable storytelling purposes, automatically inducing a sympathetic reaction from its audience. Characters like The Man with No Name or Max Rockantasky are lone warriors who possess a set of admirable strengths and underlying weaknesses but are wholly independent of the societal pressures that have moulded them. Going outside its boundaries is simultaneously freeing and challenging. Loneliness could also transform an individual, leading him or her to contribute more to society like Amelie’s self-titled protagonist or withdraw and violently lash out like the narrator in Fight Club, or Travis Bickle in Taxi Driver.
Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation depicts loneliness, neither as a virtue nor vice, but as a state of being. In turn, the film is about the value of human interaction in a land where you’re the fish out of water. Lost in Translation features two Americans staying in Tokyo, Japan: Bob, a legendary actor, is there to shoot a commercial for Japanese whiskey, and Charlotte, who travels with her photographer husband. Outside of their home country, the two become vessels of such alienation that they strike a friendship while being bored at a hotel bar. The film propelled Scarlett Johansson from a child actress into a movie star, but it also drove Bill Murray to be more interested in dramatic indie projects, instead of the studio comedies that have made him recognizable. In the film, neither of their characters is transformed or freed from the shackles of their environment, because they will be there for a brief period. What they did experience is a relationship that they’ll always remember, in the vein of Casablanca and Brief Encounter.
Lost in Translation is also a meditation about fame. Having become infamous for her awful performance in The Godfather Part III, directed by Francis Ford Coppola, Sofia Coppola became prominent as a filmmaker, emerging with her feature debut The Virgin Suicides in 1999, based on the novel by Jeffrey Eugenides. Her experiences in the entertainment industry, whether it’s her background as a model or a designer, often inform some of the choices made by Lost in Translation and it solidified her status as one of the most prominent auteurs of this century, particularly as women are a minority in American filmmaking.
Sofia Coppola was part of a new wave of American indie filmmaking, which includes Wes Anderson, Quentin Tarantino, and Spike Jonze, the latter two she briefly dated and married respectively. Rumours were circling that Charlotte’s husband John (Giovanni Ribisi) seems inspired by Jonze, especially during a scene where he reunites with Anna Farris’s airheaded actress, much to the chagrin of Charlotte. The actress resembles Cameron Diaz, whom Jonze collaborated with in Being John Malkovich. Coppola has denied these rumours, claiming that they were reminiscent of a certain “type” of the blonde-haired actress. (Conversely, Jonze’s film Her, released ten years after Lost in Translation, was interpreted as his perspective of the divorce from Coppola. Both films star Scarlett Johansson, and in Her, she played the AI that Joaquin Phoenix’s protagonist falls in love with, while Coppola’s alleged alter ego in that film is portrayed by Rooney Mara).
Sofia’s upbringing in the Coppola family, which consists of prominent actors and directors, also played a significant role in Lost in Translation. For her critics, this could be seen as a double-edged sword, highlighting her privileges and status that would be alienating for anyone who cannot empathise with her specific experiences. Lost in Translation sees Coppola being playful with her family history, rather than cynically exploiting it. In 1980, Francis Ford Coppola appeared with Akira Kurosawa (a filmmaker whom Coppola is personal friends with and says was one of his biggest influences) to promote Suntory, the same whiskey Bob is also filming for. Western celebrities appearing in whiskey ads outside of the US are not unusual, especially when it comes to the Suntory Whisky brand in Japan (the liquor label celebrates its centenary this year, and Sofia Coppola directed a tribute to Suntory with Keanu Reeves). Lost in Translation satirises the marketing that these brands would use, particularly when it’s a product that the actors do not use.
In another interview, Sofia Coppola says that she would usually make a film as if her previous efforts directly influenced it. While this meant Lost in Translation’s muted pastel palette would have been borrowed from The Virgin Suicides, its cinematography, done by Lance Acord, overall allows the outlook to define the airy and liminal atmosphere of Tokyo, putting it in a class of its own. The film is shot in numerous midshots, with each actor blocked in a way that they are a small person in a large world. Whether it’s Bob being in an elevator comprising of Japanese men, or Charlotte naval gazing at the city sitting along her hotel window. Its selection of shoegaze and alternative music, which includes My Bloody Valentine and The Jesus and Mary Chain enhances this dreamscape, evoking not just a sense of eerieness, but a familiarity with the past that brings a lot of emotional weight.
This gives us a good sense of why Lost in Translation’s moody aesthetic is appealing to many people, even twenty years after its release. Search the phrase ‘travelling alone’ on Google and you’ll find the first page out of more than a million results telling people that being on the outside is as beneficial as you think. With digital information being easier to obtain, travelling solo has become fashionable. It means that not only is travelling more accessible but there is a grasp of the country’s culture. Solo travellers, particularly women, capitalize on their travels for content creation and creating deeper communities through online and offline friendships they make along the way.
Meanwhile, in Japan, tourist attractions are designed to curb loneliness, from hostess bars to cafes with therapy pets. These things are designed to alleviate a specific kind of nerdy individual, with its aesthetic coming close to portraying solitude as a punchline. Bob and Charlotte aren’t seen touring these awkward venues (although they did visit an avant-garde strip club), nor do they have the momentum to travel, because this part is obligatory for their professional and personal lives. As things don’t meet their expectations, the underwhelming nature of this becomes overwhelming to the human mind.
Lost in Translation is more interested in capturing Bob and Charlotte’s internal and subdued emotions, as they venture to a hyper-modern world. Through Bill Murray’s reliably deadpan demeanour, Bob’s dreariness is established as he reaches his hotel room. We see him navigate the difficulties he has in his family and attempt to comprehend what the director of the Japanese Suntory advertisement wants from him, adding to his isolation. He and Charlotte experience their own set of culture shock. Bob struggles to adapt to his accommodation and experiences insomnia; one long, but hilarious sequence sees the cardio machine he uses malfunctions. We see Charlotte sightseeing in various places in Tokyo, becoming more intrigued by the culture it cultivated, whether it’s a room of people playing pachinko or roaming a Buddhist temple, the latter of which she experiences an intense emotion, calling a close friend in tears. They both talk over their phones and fax each other, but their friends and loved ones are preoccupied with work, family life or something else.
Upon its release, Lost in Translation received criticisms from the Japanese and Asian-American communities for perpetrating Orientalism. Critics claim that Tokyo’s citizens are stereotyped in a way that the Japanese are not given the fully-fledged treatments that Bob and Charlotte have received. Much of the discrepancy is due to the language barriers that both Bob and Charlotte face are considered to mock the Japanese. An Asian-American activist organisation lobbied for voters to turn against it at the Oscars (Coppola has won Best Original Screenplay out of four nominations, including Best Picture, Director and Actor for Bill Murray). To this day, criticisms continue to persist. In an anniversary piece for Bloomberg, Gearoid Reidy says ‘The Japanese characters are, at best, props — and, at worst, obstacles in the way of our bored, impossibly privileged heroes.’ To steelman these arguments, the characters only have a surface-level understanding of their temporary environments and Coppola acts as if these people are saviours, while the Japanese are being undermined by their actions.
These nitpicks, while well-intentioned, miss the point of Lost in Translation which is that it demonstrates the imperfections of being an outsider. For a majority of tourists, this is completely normal to feel alien and yearn to be back at home. It’s not uncommon for someone like Bob to misunderstand people and get mixed messages from a place he does not belong, especially when he’s not prepared to fully experience the culture. In one scene, Bob has a friendly interaction with an elderly person in the waiting room of a hospital. Despite not knowing anything that he says, it shows that he makes an effort to understand him, rather than harbour any ill will towards him due to his nationality. Coppola’s portrayal of Tokyo and its people reveals how multi-dimensional it is, with its loneliness endemic being one of its underlying features, affecting everyone. With Lost in Translation, it specifically focuses on the two Western foreigners.
The relationship between Bob and Charlotte, on the surface, shows a connection that you can rarely get elsewhere. Both are from different walks of life, stuck in the same setting and share the same. Like a lot of movies, their intimacy grows exponentially. It is neither sexual nor passionate. They attach because of their different experiences: Bob is a famous movie star while Charlotte is a Yale graduate who married too young. One sequence in which a resting Charlotte asks him “Does it get easier”, leads to the contradictions of having an empty relationship, to which Bob provides an honest and nuanced answer to that question.
In their final moments together, Bob whispers to Charlotte’s ear, as a crowd of Tokyo’s denizens walk by. As it was inaudible, there have been many speculations on what they said and what’s going to happen between them. Will they ever see each other again? Are they planning to elope? Going through authorial intent, Coppola won’t say. While she says that Bill Murray’s interpretation - that they are lovers - would be sufficient to placate the viewer’s desires, I think that whatever was said is only between them, because it’s their relationship, not the audience.
Cinema is a reflection of our changing norms, and the best films usually take a deeper and more complex look into the individual psyche. Lost in Translation was filmed before the emergence of Web 2.0, a phenomenon that has made us connect with many other people, but more distant than ever. How the film captures these contradictory emotions simultaneously lies in the fact that both Bob and Charlotte are human. While it isn’t the first film to depict a relationship between two people outside of their native homes, it has been the best at capturing the circumstances of uncertainty that caused this linkage to happen in the first place. Place and time often dictate the experiences of other people, but the emotions being bottled up usefully add to that as well. That’s why it resonates with many people and has rarely lost its influence on the medium.