REVIEW: Lost in Translation

Finding love or something else in Japan

So, there’s one thing to get out of the way off the bat for this movie. The stereotyping of Japanese culture is blatant and lazy and uninteresting, not to speak of it being offensive. Of course the otherness of the setting contributes to the pathos of the story as a tale of self-discovery and rediscovery, or in any case being lost, which may amount to the same thing. But to do it in such a ham-handed way feels basically incongruous with what is otherwise an artful and deeply felt, subtle film. 

But this sin can be forgiven, for the rest of the film flows and swells in elegant, nuanced brushstrokes, telling the tale not so much of two lovers as two peoples whose complexities overlap in just the right way at just the right time. Bill Murray plays the aging and waning screen actor Bob Harris, who despite a residual appreciation for the art that once burned inside him (early in the move, he mentions offhandedly that rather than being in Japan he could be doing a play somewhere) has found himself in Tokyo, “taking time off from [his] wife, forgetting [his] kid’s birthday, and getting paid two million dollars to endorse a Japanese whisky.” So much for art. Murray’s Harris has come to peace with the person he is – “the more you know who you are and what you want, the less you let things upset you,” he says with acceptance – but he’s not so resigned to it that he’s closed the door to life’s whimsy; indeed, this is the film’s central conceit.  And so when he spots a beautiful young American girl in the elevator, his interest is piqued, and the story begins. The role demands not just charisma, which Murray has in enviable spades, but an intuition about the small tragedies of life, an understanding not just of how youth begets age and life comes at you fast, but how you can never quite reconcile the person you’ve become with the person you once were; you can only be there while it happens, then look back and wonder.

Charlotte, portrayed with subtlety and elegance by Scarlett Johansson, is Harris’s youthful counterpart, the wife of a photographer for a record label who has followed her husband to Japan for a shoot because, in her words, she had nothing else going on. Her husband seems like a good enough guy, but he’s not all that interesting, and thus she finds herself drawn to Harris, who has taken to looking lonely in all the right ways at the hotel bar. We learn that Charlotte was a philosophy major in college who married her husband shortly after graduating, and now she’s found herself unmoored in the world, unsure of who she’s going to be and whether she likes the direction she’s headed. If Charlotte offers Harris a chance to taste life as it once was, with blank pages ahead, then he offers her a glimpse into the future, a future about which she is acutely anxious. One of the first scenes of the movie depicts Charlotte crying into the phone while talking to a loved one back home, asking through reluctant tears “who did I just marry?” But the signal breaks up, and rather than repeat the question – she could hardly bring herself to ask it the first time – she drops the topic and hangs up the phone. But the signal can’t drop with Harris; he’s right there, and he’s listening, and in fact he’s the only person on this side of the world who can really understand her. Johansson masterfully captures the uncertainty of youth saddled by thought; Charlotte is neither naive nor impulsive (although she does feel compelled to capitalize on her youth), she is simply tuned in to the passing of the seasons. 

And so we follow these two semi-lost souls as they dodge through Tokyo traffic, sing badly at a Karaoke bar, eat sushi, and generally make a sanctuary of the other. This is tender stuff, and though there’s nothing much to cry about, the sense that you’re getting pulled along by the heartstrings pervades throughout. Coppola takes the traditional romcom and doesn’t so much turn it on its head as push it out of the way. For the first half of the movie, we’re waiting with interest for Harris and Charlotte to consummate their connection; by the second half, we’ve given that up, and we instead find ourselves really invested in the characters, who are deep and smart and multifaceted. We see Harris call home more than once, Charlotte look through old photographs with her husband. These are not simple people wound up in a fit of passion, but thoughtful individuals caught in limbo, cognizant of both who they are and who they might otherwise be.

Coppola’s direction is straightforward without being basic, elegant without being pretentious, nuanced without being crowded, and the dialogue is witty, conversational, and rich with subtext. Her Tokyo is vast and vibrant, the luxurious hotel, which we mostly experience in dim lighting, a serene escape from the city’s chaos. The moody, melancholy, dream-like atmosphere bears all the hallmarks of romance, but this is not the romance of yore. Rather, Coppola opts, wisely, for restraint. There’s nothing hot or steamy about this film, nothing raunchy to get worked up over. Instead, the protagonists each find themselves lost in the idea of the other, an idea that nearly manifests for real on several occasions before slipping away like sand through loosely cupped hands. 

And in this way Coppola captures the complexity of the human experience, of growing up and of being grown. Neither Harris nor Charlotte is openly hostile towards their other lives, so to speak, but they’re self-aware enough to recognize that there’s a world beyond the tracks they’ve chosen, and who can presume to know for sure that they’ve picked right? The interplay between Harris and Charlotte is romantic, sure, but romance is such a fickle thing. What’s far more enduring, and what Coppola chooses to focus on, is the way romance changes us, the way it can pull the blinders over our heads and give us, briefly, a different kind of clarity. Maybe it doesn’t last forever, but that’s the story of life, isn’t it? Sometimes a week in Japan is enough.

4/5