moving mood piece

Rating: Null/10 (11 April 2004)

As its title suggests, Sofia Coppola's Oscar-nominated film is the story of two lost souls who find one another in a foreign-speaking land (in this case, Tokyo). Bob Harris is a world-famous action movie star from the 1970's who is in the city to appear in a commercial for a Japanese whiskey. Charlotte is a young American woman in her twenties who has flown over from the states to be with her photographer husband while he does a shoot for a Japanese rock band. Staying at the same luxury hotel, Bob and Charlotte eventually cross paths and find themselves irresistibly drawn to one another.
Bob and Charlotte are both introspective people, fully convinced that the lives they are leading are sterile, stifling and meaningless. Bob, despite the obvious `success' he's enjoyed  fame, fortune and family  finds himself burned out and deeply dissatisfied with virtually every aspect of the life he's built for himself. When we first meet Bob, he appears to be a man dragging himself through life, utterly unable even to feign the interest and enthusiasm that the people he meets expect of him. In a brilliant performance, Bill Murray conveys this weary cynicism more through his body language and facial expressions than through words. Indeed, it isn't until much later in the film  after he and Charlotte have found one another and have begun to communicate on an intimate level  that Bob is able to even halfway articulate what it is he is going though. Charlotte, despite the fact that she is essentially just starting out in life, feels equally lost and rudderless, finding herself married to a man with whom she has little in common both intellectually and emotionally. As Charlotte, Scarlett Johansson provides a poignant portrait of a woman who has so much to offer if only someone would be open enough to accept it. Luckily for her, Bob comes along to do just that; unluckily, he is no more `available' than she is to make this relationship work.
As conceived by Coppola, `Lost in Translation' is more than just a tremendously sad evocation of unrequited love. It is a heartrending tale about what happens when we not only marry the wrong person but end up meeting our soul mate when it is obviously too late to do anything about it. As a writer, Coppola has opted to convey more of her meaning through silence and indirection than through dialogue and drama. As a director, she often lingers for long periods of time over seemingly irrelevant details of daily life, creating a lyrical, poetic mood that enhances the melancholic tale she is telling. The film sometimes feels more undernourished and less revelatory than it might have been had she allowed her characters to open up to each other in a more fully articulate way. We sometimes feels as if Bob and Charlotte have so much more to say to each other  and to us - that we end up growing strangely impatient. But then we just have to remind ourselves that that is the point Coppola is setting out to make here, that we can't always find the words to express the complexity of our feelings adequately and that sometimes we just have to find that special person who can understand us at our deepest level even without words. That is what Bob and Charlotte do for one another as epitomized by that whispered bit of dialogue at the end that the audience is never intended to hear. What Bob says to Charlotte we never know, but, whatever it is, it has meaning and significance only to her.
`Lost in Translation' demands a certain level of patience from its audience. But anyone who can appreciate a subtle, beautifully acted and exquisitely directed character study should find many subsurface rewards in this film.