Dubious haiku

Rating: Null/10 (30 June 2004)

Lost in Translation is about the absurdity of failed communication. Faxes and long-distance calls substitute for actual exchange. Bill Murray, an over-it actor in Tokyo to make a whiskey ad, strains to articulate his need for change to his wife, a hectoring voice more interested in scolding Murray than in listening to him. Scarlett Johansson calls an American friend, wanting to convey her bewilderment at being abandoned by her husband - he is away on a fashion shoot - in a strange city. Tears rolling down her cheeks, she fumbles for words: oblivious, her friend excuses herself, with a rejoinder to "Call me when you get back."
It is funny, then, that the film should be so reserved. It reminded me of haikus, three-line poems that set a concrete image next to some larger idea or feeling. The reader draws the connections, makes the meaning. As Johansson wanders among women arranging flowers, or later, tours Kyoto, there is no obvious narrative end to the scenes. Often they are wordless. We are taken on a mini-tour of Tokyo as a foreigner without any language might encounter it. Johansson is our escort, unobtrusive yet intended to make our own reactions more acute. In Kyoto, she watches a traditional wedding: this reverberates with our knowledge of Johansson's ambivalent feelings toward her own marriage. This is directorial shorthand, a dubious haiku  feelings are rarely dramatised, but gently evoked. I would gladly have exchanged the lightness of touch for some conflict, a story.
The director, Sofia Coppola, has described the film as a love-letter to Tokyo. It is a fairly ambivalent Valentine. We have a hoary old routine while Murray is making his whiskey ad: the director gives him long, emphatic instructions in his native tongue, which an assistant then translates in two or three words. (The film goes in for soft comic targets  there is little wit in the treatment of a blond starlet who sings off-key karaoke and talks at length about Hollywood diets. She is meant to serve as contrast to Johansson, but really Johansson is not much more articulate.) We are meant to smile at Tokyo's sweetly misguided idea of Western culture. An escort is sent to Murray's room: she assumes that he wants a sexual assault fantasy. She writhes on the floor of his room, begging him not to hurt her. He stands bemused, not touching her. It is the idea of the accommodating Oriental taken to scary lengths.