Leaves you thinking

Rating: Null/10 (20 September 2003)

"Lost in Translation" is about two disparate people who have in common the fact that each of them is isolated from their husband/wife in the absurdist landscape of modern cosmopolitan Tokyo.
The main characters are Charlotte and Bob. Charlotte is left alone as her fashion photographer husband is off for days on location. Bob is a former action-style movie star who has been hired to endorse a Japanese whiskey. They meet one another while coping with jet-lag in the hotel they happen to share.
Since each is like a floating piece of their own familiar culture in a sea of Japanese perversions of Western banality, they reflexively cling to one another. As they do this, they develop a wonderfully innocent intimacy based upon each's struggle for personal identity - a quest which they share, although for different reasons.
Against the backdrop of intense objectification which is Tokyo, these two characters find each other in the most delightful way.
Their relationship is captured very nicely in a scene in which the two of them are lying together in a large hotel bed after 'clubbing' into the morning. They're both almost fully clothed - Bob is flat on his back with his arms at his sides, and Charlotte is curled up near him and facing him. They lay there talking yet keep their distance until Bob closes his hand gently over Charlotte's shoeless foot.
The audience is tempted to see him reach out for her hand or face, but the fact that he touches her foot becomes at once a metaphor for their situation: They are two very different people, still at a distance, who connect in an awkward way.
Their relationship builds in intensity until the wonderfully satisfying conclusion - which I won't divulge, except to say that it is at once both heartbreaking and exquisitely affirming.