Lost in Translation

23/10/2024

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 When Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation came out it managed to capture youthful yearnings and ageing concerns and was an account of ambiguous intimacies developing between two Americans a bit lost in a Tokyo they comprehend even less than they understand themselves. Now it is a film to be argued over representatively. There may always have been problems with how Japan was portrayed in the film and maybe a little with Scarlet Johansson (Charlotte) playing opposite a rumpled and stupefied Bill Murray (Bob)). But the discussion was more about Sofia Coppola making an American film with a European sensibility, filmed in Japan. As Roger Ebert said, “I can't tell you how many people have told me that just don't get "Lost in Translation." They want to know what it's about. They complain "nothing happens." They've been trained by movies that tell them where to look and what to feel, in stories that have a beginning, a middle and an end.” (RogerEbert.com) Now it seems the argument isn’t over its pace and ambiguity but about its representational offensiveness. 

     As Homay King noted after the film came out, “the film’s Japanese distributor, Tohokushinsha Co., opted for a delayed opening at a single Tokyo movie theater, with a website trailer as its sole advertisement. Local critics were not laughing either: Yoshio Tsuchiya called the film ‘stereotypical and discriminatory’; the writer Kotaro Sawaki noted that the Japanese characters ‘are consistently portrayed as foolish.’” (Film Quarterly) King’s piece is a nuanced account of the film’s often orientalist discourse, but the writer is always aware of what the film is doing over the outrage that she might be feeling. Looking at the film in 2021, Nadia Jo says: “Lost in Translation” reinforces negative stereotypes of Asians, contributing to systemic racism and the false notion often perpetuated by movies that only white people have complex lives and thoughts.” She also muses over the sexual politics: seeing the film as a “love story” — performed by a 52-year-old Murray and a 17-year-old Johansson, might I add.” (Stanford Daily) There are problems with Lost in Translation but when Jo says, “white Americans can ignore the complexity of other countries to sulk in their feelings of alienation (which they caused for themselves), to think about the meaning of life and to cheat on their spouses”, we might wish that the polemic came with more critical comprehension. We do know that for most of the time in Japan, Charlotte’s photographer husband has ignored her and we might wonder if his request that he join her on a shoot is half-hearted. We also know that Bob’s wife is always in a hurry to get off the phone. That doesn’t give them the right to an affair but then there is nothing to suggest they have been having one. True, Bob has a one-night stand that Charlotte half-witnesses the next morning, and she looks hurt, but the film surely plays with the moral ambivalence of the fling. Bob’s wife won’t know about it but Charlotte does, and so his apologetic look is for Charlotte though any apology he ought to offer would be to his spouse, presuming she isn’t having an affair herself, that some might infer in her constant need to rush off. Then again, maybe she is in a hurry because she is busy with the kids. We don’t know as the film is careful to stay close to the perspectives of its two leading characters. When Bob is on the phone we only have her voice to go on (and one of the children crying in the background); when Charlotte’s husband goes off on a shoot he disappears from the film. These are characters with their reasons but the film chooses no more to be privy to them than to pay attention to the various Japanese characters in the film. Some might find the work suffocatingly solipsistic; others that Coppola knows that to emphasise an intimate atmosphere it is important to keep the other characters vague.  

          This doesn’t mean the film oughtn’t to be criticised but how to do so on its terms over general notions of sexism and racism? With broad criticism, the film feels untouched, as though the critic could take any number of other examples just as easily to forward their insistent position. But what does it mean to criticise a film on its terms, a common enough notion but worth a bit of analysis. One way is to think of Bill Murray’s casting. “Coppola insisted she wouldn’t have made the film without him: People were trying to give me other options but I was set that I wasn’t going to make the movie if he wasn’t doing it and I really wanted to make this movie, so I had to find him.” (Little White Lies) Murray is an actor who often plays characters who are both befuddled and unfazed, confused but rarely distressed. He can even witness his wife’s ongoing affairs and complicated relationship with her half-brother in The Royal Tenenbaums without too much anguish, and can take waking up each morning to events endlessly repeating themselves without conveying panic in Groundhog Day. In Broken Flowers, he surveys the wreckage that is his emotional life with a journey through memory lane that is always more sardonic than maudlin. Murray neither quite laughs at himself nor laughs at others, well aware that life is a farce masquerading as tragedy. 

      If we are going to see in Lost in Translation moments of misogyny, for example, and cultural offensiveness, it might be useful doing so through the humour that fails; that leans too far into laughing at others rather than oneself. When an escort arrives at Bob’s hotel room and asks him to rip her stockings, the woman’s inability to pronounce r as it comes out as an l is a source of the laziest of humour and the most obvious of stereotypes. The scene relies on the Japanese woman’s broad display rather than on Murray’s gift for deadpan reaction. As she writhes around on the floor, it combines female hysteria with notions of oriental perversion, and watching it we may wonder if Murray’s face is registering Bob’s dismay at this woman’s antics or his own at Coppola for including such a scene. There are other similar ones of comedic predictability but without the tendentiousness. When Bob uses a gym cross machine he can’t find the right rhythm and speed and hangs on as if to a bucking bronco. It is in the long comic tradition of trying to cope with technology (Modern Times, Bananas) but it also manages to reflect Bob’s attempt to improve himself at the least appropriate of times: he has been drinking and smoking in the bar earlier, and it seems to be the middle of the night — the scene functions differently than if it had been a morning work out.  It suggests more a half-hearted attempt to get fit than a serious attempt at doing so. Murray is the sort of actor always just a little out of shape, always a bit scruffy around the edges and with pitted skin that added several years to his age. Any attempt at vanity seems impulsive and the scene indicates a reflects a mood over bodily analysis — even if moments before we see him looking in the mirror in his tux. 

     While Murray’s purpose is often to look amused; Johansson’s is to look troubled. Bob looks like a man trying to get through the trip as painlessly as possible (he is there to make a whisky advert), while Charlotte tries to comprehend how she feels about this trip so far from home. She is a recent graduate from Yale and already married, but the film proposes Charlotte is looking for more than she finds in having completed a prestigious degree and marrying an ambitious photographer. When speaking to someone on the phone early in the film she tries to convey how little she felt while listening to monks chanting. Bob wouldn’t have been inclined to fret over such a failing, even if Murray experts will recall him playing a man in serious crisis in The Razor’s Edge, where he spends time in a Buddhist monastery in India. But Murray’s qualities rest on the wry and the dry; not on the spiritually tortured. His perspective on life is based on this life, not beyond it, well encapsulated in the best-known exchange in the film. Charlotte asks him about kids and Bob says, “it’s the most terrifying day of your life the day the first one is born,” and Charlotte says nobody ever tells you that. “Your life as you know it...is gone,” Bob says. “Never to return. But they learn how to walk, and they learn how to talk... and you want to be with them. And they turn out to be the most delightful people you will ever meet in your life.” He offers it as if bringing Charlotte back down to earth, and who better to do it than the actor who when witnessing ghost ectoplasm in Ghostbusters refers to it as snot? 

             Johansson may have been seventeen when she shot the film but this is a rare example of an actress playing older than her years rather than younger than them. Coppola and producer Ross Katz saw in Johansson an appealing maturity: “Scarlett has a worldliness, a sense of having lived a life that is well beyond her years” (Cinephilia and Beyond) Katz noted. If there has often been something immature about Murray, that his worldly-wise personality contains within it a teen prankster, Johansson often seems more the opposite: a person who grew up young and now not even forty has been in many films and supported various political causes. 

        If the film feels like a star vehicle it rests on a chemistry between two actors who have to play something between father and daughter, and two lovers. Those determined to see an abusive relationship would have first of all to locate the moment where this affair took place. Unlike In the Mood for Love, no such scene can be inferred, and Coppola saw it as a liminal space Bob and Charlotte created that needn’t be sexual but didn’t have to be paternal or fatherly. “It’s supposed to be romantic but on the edge. Those relationships you have in real life—a little bit more than friends but not an actual romance. They get each other and it’s flirtatious. They both know it’s not going to go anywhere. To me, it’s pretty un-sexual between them—innocent and romantic, and a friendship.” (Cinephilia and Beyond) That might still be too close to troublesome in an era that has seen Weinstein, Epstein and others exposed, but it would be a terrible triumph for the predatory if the nuanced is as vanquished from cinema as its sexual offenders. The removal of the unjust is one thing; the decision that film has to reflect that moral stance absolutely, in case any sign of age-gape desire remains, is a dereliction of aesthetic purpose. Those who conflate the film’s sexual politics with the film’s sometimes lazy Japanese stereotyping are missing the key difference: in the scene in the hotel room with the sex worker, as in a couple of the scenes where Bob is filming the whisky advert, and when Bob appears on Japanese television, the film plays for broad comedy. In those between Bob and Charlotte Coppola seeks a quieter mood where two people are taking each other’s feelings very seriously indeed, and these feelings needn’t necessarily suggest romance. 

        They might be all the more serious for romance’s relative absence. Just as many a film will offer an impossible romance as characters come together but are well aware that no long-time good can come out of the pairing, so Lost in Translation offers an unlikely one, so unlikely that it shouldn’t be consummated but only mutually understood. It is the sort of encounter that won’t have them getting together but might see them separating from their respective partners, as though they wouldn’t be likely to find satisfaction in each other, but it might illuminate the dissatisfaction they have with their spouses. As Coppola says, “she and Bob are two people at opposite ends of something comparable; she’s just going into a marriage and he’s on the other end, having been in one for years,” (Cinephilia and Beyond). The similarity rests on neither being happy within them. Coppola insists this neither leads to the coupledom of Charlotte and Bob, nor the break ups of either marriage, but leaves the characters in a state of suspension, in a bubble that the film won’t quite burst. This is helped along by Lance Accord’s cinematography, using  glass to reflect both interior and external worlds and interior and exterior thoughts, and a dense soundtrack including work by Death in Vegas, My Bloody Valentine and The Jesus Mary Chain. It is music that captures a world in abeyance, and Lost in Translation is at its best when allowing the characters to float in the amniotic fluid of Coppola’s dreaminess. 

© Tony McKibbin

Tony McKibbin

Lost in Translation

 When Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation came out it managed to capture youthful yearnings and ageing concerns and was an account of ambiguous intimacies developing between two Americans a bit lost in a Tokyo they comprehend even less than they understand themselves. Now it is a film to be argued over representatively. There may always have been problems with how Japan was portrayed in the film and maybe a little with Scarlet Johansson (Charlotte) playing opposite a rumpled and stupefied Bill Murray (Bob)). But the discussion was more about Sofia Coppola making an American film with a European sensibility, filmed in Japan. As Roger Ebert said, “I can't tell you how many people have told me that just don't get "Lost in Translation." They want to know what it's about. They complain "nothing happens." They've been trained by movies that tell them where to look and what to feel, in stories that have a beginning, a middle and an end.” (RogerEbert.com) Now it seems the argument isn’t over its pace and ambiguity but about its representational offensiveness. 

     As Homay King noted after the film came out, “the film’s Japanese distributor, Tohokushinsha Co., opted for a delayed opening at a single Tokyo movie theater, with a website trailer as its sole advertisement. Local critics were not laughing either: Yoshio Tsuchiya called the film ‘stereotypical and discriminatory’; the writer Kotaro Sawaki noted that the Japanese characters ‘are consistently portrayed as foolish.’” (Film Quarterly) King’s piece is a nuanced account of the film’s often orientalist discourse, but the writer is always aware of what the film is doing over the outrage that she might be feeling. Looking at the film in 2021, Nadia Jo says: “Lost in Translation” reinforces negative stereotypes of Asians, contributing to systemic racism and the false notion often perpetuated by movies that only white people have complex lives and thoughts.” She also muses over the sexual politics: seeing the film as a “love story” — performed by a 52-year-old Murray and a 17-year-old Johansson, might I add.” (Stanford Daily) There are problems with Lost in Translation but when Jo says, “white Americans can ignore the complexity of other countries to sulk in their feelings of alienation (which they caused for themselves), to think about the meaning of life and to cheat on their spouses”, we might wish that the polemic came with more critical comprehension. We do know that for most of the time in Japan, Charlotte’s photographer husband has ignored her and we might wonder if his request that he join her on a shoot is half-hearted. We also know that Bob’s wife is always in a hurry to get off the phone. That doesn’t give them the right to an affair but then there is nothing to suggest they have been having one. True, Bob has a one-night stand that Charlotte half-witnesses the next morning, and she looks hurt, but the film surely plays with the moral ambivalence of the fling. Bob’s wife won’t know about it but Charlotte does, and so his apologetic look is for Charlotte though any apology he ought to offer would be to his spouse, presuming she isn’t having an affair herself, that some might infer in her constant need to rush off. Then again, maybe she is in a hurry because she is busy with the kids. We don’t know as the film is careful to stay close to the perspectives of its two leading characters. When Bob is on the phone we only have her voice to go on (and one of the children crying in the background); when Charlotte’s husband goes off on a shoot he disappears from the film. These are characters with their reasons but the film chooses no more to be privy to them than to pay attention to the various Japanese characters in the film. Some might find the work suffocatingly solipsistic; others that Coppola knows that to emphasise an intimate atmosphere it is important to keep the other characters vague.  

          This doesn’t mean the film oughtn’t to be criticised but how to do so on its terms over general notions of sexism and racism? With broad criticism, the film feels untouched, as though the critic could take any number of other examples just as easily to forward their insistent position. But what does it mean to criticise a film on its terms, a common enough notion but worth a bit of analysis. One way is to think of Bill Murray’s casting. “Coppola insisted she wouldn’t have made the film without him: People were trying to give me other options but I was set that I wasn’t going to make the movie if he wasn’t doing it and I really wanted to make this movie, so I had to find him.” (Little White Lies) Murray is an actor who often plays characters who are both befuddled and unfazed, confused but rarely distressed. He can even witness his wife’s ongoing affairs and complicated relationship with her half-brother in The Royal Tenenbaums without too much anguish, and can take waking up each morning to events endlessly repeating themselves without conveying panic in Groundhog Day. In Broken Flowers, he surveys the wreckage that is his emotional life with a journey through memory lane that is always more sardonic than maudlin. Murray neither quite laughs at himself nor laughs at others, well aware that life is a farce masquerading as tragedy. 

      If we are going to see in Lost in Translation moments of misogyny, for example, and cultural offensiveness, it might be useful doing so through the humour that fails; that leans too far into laughing at others rather than oneself. When an escort arrives at Bob’s hotel room and asks him to rip her stockings, the woman’s inability to pronounce r as it comes out as an l is a source of the laziest of humour and the most obvious of stereotypes. The scene relies on the Japanese woman’s broad display rather than on Murray’s gift for deadpan reaction. As she writhes around on the floor, it combines female hysteria with notions of oriental perversion, and watching it we may wonder if Murray’s face is registering Bob’s dismay at this woman’s antics or his own at Coppola for including such a scene. There are other similar ones of comedic predictability but without the tendentiousness. When Bob uses a gym cross machine he can’t find the right rhythm and speed and hangs on as if to a bucking bronco. It is in the long comic tradition of trying to cope with technology (Modern Times, Bananas) but it also manages to reflect Bob’s attempt to improve himself at the least appropriate of times: he has been drinking and smoking in the bar earlier, and it seems to be the middle of the night — the scene functions differently than if it had been a morning work out.  It suggests more a half-hearted attempt to get fit than a serious attempt at doing so. Murray is the sort of actor always just a little out of shape, always a bit scruffy around the edges and with pitted skin that added several years to his age. Any attempt at vanity seems impulsive and the scene indicates a reflects a mood over bodily analysis — even if moments before we see him looking in the mirror in his tux. 

     While Murray’s purpose is often to look amused; Johansson’s is to look troubled. Bob looks like a man trying to get through the trip as painlessly as possible (he is there to make a whisky advert), while Charlotte tries to comprehend how she feels about this trip so far from home. She is a recent graduate from Yale and already married, but the film proposes Charlotte is looking for more than she finds in having completed a prestigious degree and marrying an ambitious photographer. When speaking to someone on the phone early in the film she tries to convey how little she felt while listening to monks chanting. Bob wouldn’t have been inclined to fret over such a failing, even if Murray experts will recall him playing a man in serious crisis in The Razor’s Edge, where he spends time in a Buddhist monastery in India. But Murray’s qualities rest on the wry and the dry; not on the spiritually tortured. His perspective on life is based on this life, not beyond it, well encapsulated in the best-known exchange in the film. Charlotte asks him about kids and Bob says, “it’s the most terrifying day of your life the day the first one is born,” and Charlotte says nobody ever tells you that. “Your life as you know it...is gone,” Bob says. “Never to return. But they learn how to walk, and they learn how to talk... and you want to be with them. And they turn out to be the most delightful people you will ever meet in your life.” He offers it as if bringing Charlotte back down to earth, and who better to do it than the actor who when witnessing ghost ectoplasm in Ghostbusters refers to it as snot? 

             Johansson may have been seventeen when she shot the film but this is a rare example of an actress playing older than her years rather than younger than them. Coppola and producer Ross Katz saw in Johansson an appealing maturity: “Scarlett has a worldliness, a sense of having lived a life that is well beyond her years” (Cinephilia and Beyond) Katz noted. If there has often been something immature about Murray, that his worldly-wise personality contains within it a teen prankster, Johansson often seems more the opposite: a person who grew up young and now not even forty has been in many films and supported various political causes. 

        If the film feels like a star vehicle it rests on a chemistry between two actors who have to play something between father and daughter, and two lovers. Those determined to see an abusive relationship would have first of all to locate the moment where this affair took place. Unlike In the Mood for Love, no such scene can be inferred, and Coppola saw it as a liminal space Bob and Charlotte created that needn’t be sexual but didn’t have to be paternal or fatherly. “It’s supposed to be romantic but on the edge. Those relationships you have in real life—a little bit more than friends but not an actual romance. They get each other and it’s flirtatious. They both know it’s not going to go anywhere. To me, it’s pretty un-sexual between them—innocent and romantic, and a friendship.” (Cinephilia and Beyond) That might still be too close to troublesome in an era that has seen Weinstein, Epstein and others exposed, but it would be a terrible triumph for the predatory if the nuanced is as vanquished from cinema as its sexual offenders. The removal of the unjust is one thing; the decision that film has to reflect that moral stance absolutely, in case any sign of age-gape desire remains, is a dereliction of aesthetic purpose. Those who conflate the film’s sexual politics with the film’s sometimes lazy Japanese stereotyping are missing the key difference: in the scene in the hotel room with the sex worker, as in a couple of the scenes where Bob is filming the whisky advert, and when Bob appears on Japanese television, the film plays for broad comedy. In those between Bob and Charlotte Coppola seeks a quieter mood where two people are taking each other’s feelings very seriously indeed, and these feelings needn’t necessarily suggest romance. 

        They might be all the more serious for romance’s relative absence. Just as many a film will offer an impossible romance as characters come together but are well aware that no long-time good can come out of the pairing, so Lost in Translation offers an unlikely one, so unlikely that it shouldn’t be consummated but only mutually understood. It is the sort of encounter that won’t have them getting together but might see them separating from their respective partners, as though they wouldn’t be likely to find satisfaction in each other, but it might illuminate the dissatisfaction they have with their spouses. As Coppola says, “she and Bob are two people at opposite ends of something comparable; she’s just going into a marriage and he’s on the other end, having been in one for years,” (Cinephilia and Beyond). The similarity rests on neither being happy within them. Coppola insists this neither leads to the coupledom of Charlotte and Bob, nor the break ups of either marriage, but leaves the characters in a state of suspension, in a bubble that the film won’t quite burst. This is helped along by Lance Accord’s cinematography, using  glass to reflect both interior and external worlds and interior and exterior thoughts, and a dense soundtrack including work by Death in Vegas, My Bloody Valentine and The Jesus Mary Chain. It is music that captures a world in abeyance, and Lost in Translation is at its best when allowing the characters to float in the amniotic fluid of Coppola’s dreaminess. 


© Tony McKibbin