Subversion in Tokyo

Rating: 9/10 (30 October 2003)

Charlotte is a 24-year old philosophy graduate from Yale, married for two years to a commercial photographer of film and music personalities currently working Tokyo popular culture as if it were a gold rush. Charlotte is by his side but in her isolation is losing her own sense of self. Bob Harris, stuck in a kind of repetitive mid-life crisis, is brought to his knees in Tokyo while he shoots a lucrative ad campaign for a Japanese whiskey. Bob is an internationally known actor whose career and life has strayed very far from his original intentions. (Our understanding is that Bob is a `beloved' star of the screen whose cinematic glory days are well behind him.) For Bob, who feels beyond alien in this foreign land (which presumably he has visited before with better results), the strangeness and impenetrability of Tokyo culture (of which he himself is a part) brings on a crisis of dysfunctional proportions.
And so, Bob and Charlotte float about, having lost their moorings amidst a sea of unfamiliar faces in contemporary Tokyo. Lost in Translation is about how like-minded people find each other in such a sea; how these two people come to each other's rescue and, possibly, change each other forever.
That last bit, `the changing forever' bit, is far beyond what director Sofia Coppola would contrive for us to believe here, and though Lost in Translation has its contrivances, they are not of the gratuitous, rom-com variety. Coppola protects Charlotte and Bob from the mass multiplex audiences who have paid their money and want very much to be jerked off in some consumerist, superficial way with a soundtrack of oldies and endless montages of a glamorous `happy' couple, played by performers who are soulless enough to enact a shorthand, cinematic equivalent of a Hallmark card (Richard Gere and Winona Ryder anyone?)-all of which she could have very easily done. Instead, Coppola subverts our every expectation of how a relationship should be portrayed on screen, perhaps most strikingly, by giving her characters dignity. Bob and Charlotte are not show-offs; they don't jump through hoops to convince the audience-to signpost in oh so familiar ways-that their connection, whether it be romantic or a shared sensibility, is genuine. Instead we see the comfort and ease with which they take each other on, the way they care for each other, in their desperation, more than they do themselves. We also see it in the decidedly chaste way they pursue their relationship, though they express a lot of affection for one another as they laugh at each other's jokes and take ownership of each other during their stay in Tokyo. (Charlotte says to Bob, `Let's never come back here because it will never be the same,' in one of Coppola's many gentle ways of suggesting that it's people, not objects, that give us a sense of place.) In one of the film's loveliest moments, Bob and Charlotte find themselves in a contortionist stripper bar, a place where Charlotte has unknowingly suggested they meet, and though both are bemused by their surroundings, when Bob asks if he should get some drinks-going along with her presumably planned scenario-Charlotte says, `No, let's go.' And both are out the door. Though the dialogue is sparse throughout, Coppola consistently nails moments like this that speak volumes about how much Bob and Charlotte are in each other's pockets, sharing their existence.
What Bob and Charlotte share as well-profoundly, deeply-is a sense that contemporary marriage is dead, an over-rated, useless, almost joyless invention that both feel kind of hoodwinked into, like the heterosexual rite of passage that it is. (When Bob says, `life as you know it ends with the birth of your first child,' Charlotte says, `They never tell you that.') Both feel cheated by false expectations and one can't help but feel, given they've been married (to other people) for twenty-five and two years, respectively, that their discontent with modern marriage has something to do with the consumerist age in which we live. Charlotte's ever-absent husband doesn't even think to include her when meeting a friend in the hotel bar-after he's left her alone and completely isolated for days on end. Bob's wife phones and faxes infrequently and then in a terse and tired way, mostly to inquire about carpet samples, the message being: `Our lives go on even though yours has come to a dead halt. Save yourself.'
A rather stunning moment in Ms. Coppola's film comes when Bob does lack fidelity and more than a little sense; even though theirs is not a sexual relationship, Charlotte feels a complicated brew of emotions in a scene with just a few bits of short, sharp dialogue where Bob is chastised for behaving in, for him, a very undignified manner while Charlotte gets a jolt from Bob as a reminder of how much he has given himself to her, much more than she would ever know. Coppola, the screenwriter and director, navigates this relationship with considerable skill, acknowledging these deep pockets of feeling without ever giving in to the romantic convention of cramming in a lifetime's worth of experiences between her leads in a few short days or similar rom-com pornography; Charlotte and Bob never seek to define their relationship for themselves or the audience but we see it in the way they continue to be drawn to each other and eventually seek each other out, we see it in the way Charlotte finds that when seated, Bob is just tall enough for her to rest her weary head comfortably on his soft shoulder.
Coppola proves a very light touch with comedy as well and Bill Murray's considerable talents are an obvious inspiration for all of the character-based humour; to her credit, Lost in Translation doesn't feel like a comedy or a drama, it just feels like life. Scarlett Johannsson is literally 19 years-old going on 24 and the maturity and just plain cinematic nous she displays makes one wonder-probably much as Bob Harris does-what the future holds for this startlingly perceptive and talented actress. Her lovely bottom opens the film and from the first frame one realises you would have to be mad to leave her alone for too long-those lips, those eyes and lovely thighsbut one of the most ground-breaking elements in Coppola's film is her ability to suggest that Bob Harris-a man of considerable age and experience-sees something far more valuable in Charlotte than just her physical proportions. These two actually have a spiritual connection. Coppola doesn't put Johannsson through the well-known ingénue paces of funny hats, costume changes and long pop video montages whereby she must dance around and seduce not just Bob but the entire cinema going public-on the contrary, when that moment comes and Johannsson has the opportunity to wow us with a karaoke version of Brass In Pocket, both director and performer pass it by without so much as a backward glance. Instead, the moment is about her level of comfort with Bob, the way in which they both are at ease with each other. Both performers are very much on the same page as their director who by presenting an A-list Hollywood talent and personality vacuum in the form of Kelly (a hilarious, brutal impersonation of Cameron Diaz by Anna Faris) reminds us quite easily what Johannsson as Charlotte could've been subjected to by another filmmaker. This isn't that film and Coppola isn't that filmmaker. She's the one who knows and demonstrates here that the cinema can be a place where sometimes we retreat because we need to sit in the dark and contemplate our own lives as well as the loves, connections and the places and people in it. Bravo.