Stylish mood piece, perhaps romanticises alienation

Rating: Null/10 (21 May 2010)

"If love is blind, why is lingerie so popular?" - Unknown
Sophia Coppola directs "Lost In Translation". The plot? Two alienated characters - a sultry American young woman and a suave but elderly Hollywood movie star - have a platonic affair whilst in a Tokyo grand hotel. Both are romantically involved with vapid parters, her a celebrity photographer, him a wife back home in America, and so begin to feel increasingly estranged from their spouses.
Themes of isolation, globalisation, alienation and existential ennui are brought up, but Coppola never develops them into anything substantial. Yes, jet-lag is the quintessential postmodern condition, fragmentation and dislocation perhaps mankind's future state of mind, but Coppola keeps things on the level of poetry, unable to link cause and effect to anything particularly revelatory. Indeed, by now it becomes apparent that all of Coppola's films are autobiographical tales which repeat the same story: the tale of a privileged white girl - a princess in a castle very much like young Sophia was once herself - who is surrounded and sick of affluence and who is rescued from alienation by overt or covert sex with a daddy figure. Like much of Woody Allen's filmography, sex is offered as an existential cure. Which is fine; human connection, sexual or otherwise, is electric, but too often this reduces what are social, political and economic problems to a kind of navel gazing and narcissism.
The film is well acted by a sexualised Scarlett Johansson and a charmingly forlorn Bill Murray, who essentially plays her sugar daddy. The film offers nice ambiance, sparkling cityscapes, the romantic glow of fluorescent lights and a dreamy soundtrack, but Coppola prettifies and romanticises that which should suffocate. As a comparison, see Olivier Assayas' "Summer Hours", and his duology of "Demonlover" and "Boarding Gate", two trashy B movies which cover similar ground. Some others: "Red Desert", "What Time Is It There?", Claire Denis' "35 Shots of Rum", Jia Zhangke's "24 City", "Still Life" and "Platform", "The Girlfriend Experience", "Syndromes and a Century", "Pulse", "L'Enfant", "Code46", "The Class", Wim Wenders' "Land of Plenty" and the various existential musings of Antonioni, Bergman and Nicholas Ray ("Bigger Than Life", "In A Lonely Place" etc). These films aren't necessarily better, but attempt to deal with the various causes which instigate the very melancholic mood that Coppola serves up.
One further odd detail is Coppola's need to tell this tale against the backdrop of Japan. There is a perception that existential angst is a uniquely "white problem" and "upper class" problem, individuals of colour, because they are perceived as a "collective" rather than "individuals", always immune to such suffering. It would take an essay to chart the linkages between political, psychological and social fragmentation (and so alienation) - the Inclosure Acts hundreds of years ago, capitalism's commodification of time, urban drift in the Industrial Age, Jameson's "waning of affect", the death of master narratives etc etc – but the point is, these isolating forces affect minorities just as much, if not more, than they affect whites.
Films always portray the angst of middle and upper class white people in a heroic, portentous, important light. Characters of privilege are shown to suffer an existential ennui that is harsher to the trivial, material struggles of people of colour, of Mexican immigrants, foreigners, migrants and that little Chinese guy you buy noodles from on a Friday. In reality, depression is hugely under-diagnosed among racial minorities and US born Asian American women are more likely to attempt suicide than Americans. The stereotype that racial minorities are always happy with their circumstances, because they are ostensibly simple people ruled only by primitive compulsions, is untrue.
Perhaps a more relevant film would not have required a foreign country to bring out themes of alienation (see "The Hotel" in which an American Asian kid feels alienated in America), let alone focused on privileged white characters. There's a kind of navel-gazing in this film, a kind of self-absorption, which is ironic, considering that the film's two lead characters are alienated precisely because they believe everyone around them to be self absorbed navel gazers.
Because the film is packed with Asian clowns, jokes in which Japanese confuse L's and R's and moments ("Let them be who they are!" one character says) which mock the Japanese for the way they appropriate western culture and render it camp, the film has been deemed racist by some. Make up your own mind. But this is all less a problem than Coppola's unwillingness to delve deeper into the causes of her character's ennui.
8/10 – Gorgeously shot, but this Antonioni's insufferable brand of ennui romanticised and made cosy, flirtatious and sentimental. Worth two viewings. Once for pleasure, once for pain.