lost in transition

Rating: 9/10 (16 December 2013)

Travelling for work, staying in cookie-cutter hotel rooms, negotiating soul-crushing airport transit lounges, enduring forced bonhomie in stilted conversations with people we hope never to see again...Modern working life alienates and dehumanizes us on distant shores. At times like this, we may reach out and take succor in a human connection that could only be forged in such circumstances. Lost in Translation depicts one such connection.
Charlotte and Bob meet in Japan. Some aspects of that arena are conveyed in ludicrous, hilarious detail - the uninvolved translator, the kitschy hotel lounge, the indecipherable menu. Other details are less well conveyed, such as a cringe-inducing and borderline racist depiction of a Japanese call girl. But the fact is this could be Dubai, or Bangkok, or Mexico City. Two troubled individuals wash up in an unfamiliar and alien land without the will or skills to navigate their way through. The landscape they explore is their own under-realised lives. They give each other the strength to go on.
Subtle but powerful performances from the two leads, and an understated but steady hand from Coppola, make this a fine achievement. Some wonderful comic moments, especially a hospital encounter between Murray and a local that was surely ad-libbed, are finely balanced with pathos and emotional depth. One to savour.