
Lost in Translation, reads the opening title, as if translation were a place, a city with streets to wander and delights to find, and the charactersā lostnessāinitially discomfitingāhas grown pleasurable, a misadventure turned to fun, thanks to the company. At least weāll have a good story to tell, we say on such occasions, but Bob and Charlotte wonāt share this story with anyoneāno one would understand. No sex, no scandal, nothing out of the ordinary. No, the story is one theyāll tell themselves, in the quiet of long days and nights: one of many stories from which our truer lives are made.
Fifteen years agoāhalf a life ago, if your life is the length of mineāCharlotte spotted Bob across the Park Hyatt Tokyo bar and smiled, recognizing. Not who he wasāthough she knewābut the slump in his shoulders and the tired in his eyes, the evident fact that he was having just as strange and terrible a time as she was. He was a middle-aged movie star on his way to washing up; she was a twenty-something with no idea how to wade through the vast expanse of timeāher life!āsuddenly laid out before her. And I watched their meeting from the aching, wish-ridden world of adolescence, where every song came to occupy my bloodstream and every scene was a possibility.
āItās as if someone made a movie about my life,ā I remember a friend saying of Sofia Coppolaās Lost in Translation, āonly with none of the plot points the same.ā None of the plot points were the same: we didnāt spend our days visiting shrines and gardens; we werenāt married to international photographers or befriending famous actors; weād never wandered Tokyoās arcades and karaoke bars and strip clubs. Weād never been to any karaoke bars or strip clubs, for that matter. Weād never stayed in a hotel, not a real one; we wore pilling sweatpants when we moped around our rooms, and we were perfectly aware, thank you very much, that we didnāt look like Scarlett Johanssonās Charlotte. But man, did we feel like her.
In an interview, Coppola compared Charlotteās breakdown to Frannyās in J.D. Salingerās Franny and Zooey. Seeking spiritual enlightenment in the midst of a shattering depression, Franny reads The Way of the Pilgrim and repeats the Jesus Prayer; Charlotte listens to self-help tapes about the soul. Both seek to frame their angst in the context of a more elevated struggle, an effort that echoes throughout Western thought at least as far back as the Middle Ages when depression was known as āscholarās melancholy.ā
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But thereās nothing scholarly or soulful about this: this constant irritability, this inability to eat (Franny) or sleep (Charlotte), this overwrought anguish brought on by the fact that nothingānot traveling, not talking, not the polite laughs weāre expected to offer nor the polite lies weāre supposed to tellāseems worth it any longer, worth the sheer, unbearable effort. Every little thing begins to seem incredibly, unfathomably stupid, but this knowledge doesnāt make our heroines feel any less stupid themselves.
āAnd the worst part was,ā Franny tells her brother Zooey, āI knew what a bore I was being, I knew how I was depressing people, or even hurting their feelingsābut I just couldnāt stop! I just could not stop picking.ā Charlotte, too, canāt stop picking, but when she tries to find an ally in her clueless husband, to make light of her ill-tempered stateāāEvelyn Waugh was a man,ā she confides as if sharing a gleeful secretāsheās met with admonishment. āNot everybody went to Yale,ā her husband scolds.
So thereās a wry, wonderful pleasure when Charlotte finds someone not to take her out of her unhappiness, but to meet her there. Bob, as played by Bill Murray, doesnāt need her to explain or elevate her state, doesnāt need her to snap out of it or lighten up or just relax. He is her co-conspirator, and she is his. They can be plain and miserable with each other, and they find their misery lessened along the way.
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When I moved in with my boyfriend four years ago, Lost in Translation was the only overlap between his Tarantino-heavy assembly of DVDs and my stack of Richard Linklater. For a long time, we kept both copies, sitting side by side in the middle of our merged collections. A bet hedged against a breakup, yes, but it also felt right to keep both. The movie heād seen and loved wasnāt the movie I had; the two physical copies were an accurate representation of the two movies that existed in the space between screen and mind, his and mine.
āPerhaps your favorite film isnāt the one that you like best but the one that likes you best,ā writes Teju Cole in Known and Strange Things. āIt confirms you on first encounter, and goes on to shape you in some irreversible way. Often, you first see it when youāre young, but not too young, and on each subsequent viewing it is a home to which you return.ā
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Watching Lost in Translation at 30, Iām on high alert for the ways the movie has changed; the ways I have changed. But the diminishments I half-expected arenāt the ones I find. Most of Coppolaās Japanese characters still toe the line, a very fine one, between merely flat and caricatureāthe joke of the sex workerās accent still makes me cringe, not laugh. Itās easy to decry the filmās focus on two wealthy white people plying a foreign city like a proto-Instagram shoot. But what use or artfulness is offered by criticism that demands a movie or book or television show be another movie or book or television show entirely?
Trying to meet the movie on its own terms, I see the most cartoonish of background characters (the sex worker, the talk-show host known as āthe Japanese Johnny Carsonā) as playing the one-note roles expected of themāthe characters are playing these roles, that is, not the actors. Bobās Japanese handlers, the director of the commercial, the photographer at the shootāall operate within the absurd framework of the fame industry, and that rickety scaffolding, more than any of the people who prop it up, is one subject of the filmās deconstruction.
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Another is Bob. In each of his interactionsāwhether with director and photographer or with a shower head, an exercise machineāthe jokeās on him. He is the stereotype, the caricature, sketched in only the faintest strokes: the Porsche-shopping fool fumbling his way into a mid-life crisis, the once-ambitious artist selling out, the dumb American who doesnāt know the language, the oafish john, the cheating husband, and the absent father. He plays golf against the staggering backdrop of Mt. Fuji and walks routinely, joylessly, after his ball. Bob ignores both fans and faxes from his wife; he barely leaves the plush nowhere-land of the hotel. He is a wretched outline of a man, and he knows it, and this knowledge compounds its cause.
Of course, heās also our hero. Heās given, both by the script and by Murrayās soul-scraping performance, a depth denied to almost every other character, from the Japanese hotel employees and businessmen to Charlotteās sycophantic husband and the ditzy American actress played by Anna Faris. The latter is as caricatured as they comeāāWe both have two dogs, and we both live in LA, so we have all these different things in commonāābut sheās only the most outrageous piece of evidence, among many, of the unforgiving eyes with which our protagonists, mired in their respective crises, see the world.
This distance felt by Charlotte and Bob is literalized in the phone calls they make and receive: to Charlotteās friend, from Bobās wife and agent back home. The voices coming through the phones are low, a little staticky, hard for the moviegoer to hear. What they say hardly matters. They canāt cut through the atmosphere surrounding our main characters, whose brutal moods terraform a planet just big enough for two.
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Coppola has called Lost in Translation a āvalentineā to Tokyo, though she should know better: her love letter is to her own experience of the city, where she spent time in her 20s, and not the city itself. This isnāt a flaw but an essential feature, the reason for the movieās being and achievement. āThereās no such thing as setting in fiction,ā a teacher of mine used to say. āThereās only point of view.ā The Tokyo of Coppolaās movie is a city that exists only in the minds of its protagonists: glittering, elusive, unsettling, exhilarating. The movie before us could take place anywhere. This fact can be deployed as a criticism, but it serves as the filmās beating heart. Lost in Translation isnāt a portrait of a place nor even of people, but of the shimmering space around and between them, a diptych that grows singular as it goes.
Returning to the movie, I feared that this relationship, too, might be diminished by time: both the length of time that has passed since the movieās release and the moment of time in which I watch, weighted with a hyper-vigilant attention to all that can go wrong between older, more powerful men and younger, less powerful women. But Bobās interest in a woman 20 years his junior strikes me as even more gentle, even less sexually charged, than it once did. Credit is due to Murrayās veteran presence, but credit is due, too, to Coppolaās faith in the specific story she is bent on telling, its details and its ambition.
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Both Bob and Charlotte are perfectly aware of how it looks, of the dull and ancient narrative that would claim them, of the clichĆ©s that would hem them in. So is the film they occupy. āMovies are not about what theyāre about,ā as Roger Ebert used to say. āTheyāre about how theyāre about them.ā Lost in Translation goes about its well-worn plot with a tone neither sinister nor saccharine, trying to convince the viewer of neither the rightness nor the wrongness of its central romance, but simply of its plain, particular existence.
In the course of doing so, the movie makes the admirable argument that qualities like softness and quiet are as deserving of rigorous artistic attention as their more bombastic, violent counterparts: a light kiss can be as meaningful as wall-slamming sex, a smile can convey more than a monologue. Why not be tender when we can? We know how it looks, yes, and yet. Bob tucks Charlotte into bedāshe sleeps, at lastāand departs for his own; he carries her down a hotel hallway like the child, we are reminded, that he has.
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Is this complex? Is it nuanced? Is it the kind of complex, nuanced relationship we are told, by so many straw men, will be banished from our art and our lives in the cleansing flood of the MeToo movement? Art is made of stronger stuff than straw. Good and lasting art is more than capable of locating and excavating just such tenuous relationships; movies are, in fact, a grand arena in which we might examine our uncanny wants, our sudden and inexplicable loves. The relationship between Bob and Charlotte might sound, in summary, like a cheap fantasyāthe aging man in search of vitality, the young woman in search of devotionābut summary is the opposite of art in general, of this movie in its unforgettable particulars.
āA woman must continually watch herself,ā John Berger writes in Ways of Seeing. āShe is almost continually occupied by her own image of herself. Whilst she is walking across a room or whilst she is weeping at the death of her father, she can scarcely avoid envisaging herself walking or weeping. From earliest childhood she has been taught and persuaded to survey herself continually.ā
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The camera turns to and from Charlotte in her solitary scenes, enacting this doubled vision: now we see her, now we see what she sees, now we see her againābut is it her, or what she imagines she must look like? Charlotte walks through crowds in Tokyo; Charlotte ties a slip of paper to a tree in Kyoto. Charlotte watches monks chanting and we watch her, as she does. āI didnāt feel anything,ā she says, near tears: she knows how the scene was supposed to go, and that wasnāt it.
Iām reminded of a sentence in Franny and Zooey, when Franny breaks down in a restaurant bathroom, sitting on the floor of a stall with her knees tucked together and her hands over her eyes. āHer extended fingers, though trembling or because they were trembling, looked oddly graceful and pretty,ā writes Salinger, but whoās saying this? An unknown but omnipresent narrator, yes, sure, most likely, but Iāve long harbored the unshakable thought that itās Franny, seeing herself even as she weeps. As women have been taught and persuaded to do, Berger argues, for a very long time, the ability instilled in us by the broader culture but heartily abetted by art, by books (like Salingerās), by too many movies to count. We know how we look.
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Charlotteāmarried to a photographer, spending her days between the hotelās mirror and windowāsurely does. And Coppola uses that window as a picture frame, that mirror as an accent; every shot is a glamour shot. Charlotte, like Franny before her, is a wealthy, white avatar of a depression that does not pummel only the wealthy and the white. In Negroland, Margo Jeffersonās memoir of growing up in black societyās elite echelons, she describes how she and her peers āhad been denied the privilege of freely yielding to depression, of flaunting neurosis as a mark of social and psychic complexity. A privilege that was glorified in the literature of white female suffering and resistance.ā
Itās hard not to read glorification into the cameraās lingering shots on Johanssonās beautiful, sorrowful face, on her artfully semi-nude state. (Who on earth wears just underwear and a cardigan at the same time?) āFilm always argues yes,ā the critic Renata Adler says in her essay of the same title, meaning that movies canāt help conferring desirability on whatever they depict: even on violence, in Adlerās estimation, and definitely (easily, obviously) on the bloodless, gore-free pain of angst and ennui and their harsher iterations. Itās hard to feel squeamish about wounds we canāt see.
But what else would I have the camera do? Iām contradicting my own dictum, asking this film to be another one. The movie is what it was, but Iām not: the house has grown smaller around me after all. I could clock the distance between fifteen and thirty in my own semi-annual depression: its occurrence, remission, occurrence again. Something bridles in me, this time around, at Charlotteās exquisite, well-kempt despair. Iāve known that despair. Thereās nothing pretty about it.
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I might know better, but that doesnāt mean I donāt find my throat clenching when Charlotteās does, donāt find myself meeting Bobās blank stare with my own. Iām in a strange city, too: my boyfriendānow fiancĆ©āgot a job here, and I tagged along. The country and the language are still mine, but Iāve lost some deeper mooring in the move. The last few months have been rough, casting me back to my overwrought 15-year-old self, my flailing early twenties. Itās easy to wish some glamour or some grandeur into this struggle, though I know of no such thing. I know that Charlotteās condition, and mine, is as medical as it is existential, that itāll pass. That knowledge doesnāt do either of us much good.
Something is lost in translation, not between languages but within them. We canāt make ourselves understood even to those who share our lives or our beds. We canāt quite hear, in turn, the world around us, the story running under our days. Like Bob at the commercial shoot, weāre sure weāre missing something. Weāre sure thereās more. āI donāt know what Iām supposed to do,ā Charlotte says, but knowing what youāre supposed to do doesnāt make it any easier to do it. āIām getting paid two million dollars to endorse a whiskey,ā Bob says, āwhen I could be doing a play somewhere.ā
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Watching Bob and Charlotteās story, which once felt like mine, I realize that people do these things at home, tooāarrange flowers, perform water aerobics, play arcade games, sing karaoke, slump over a hotel bar listening to syrupy lounge musicābut it can take travel to make us see them as a camera might. It can take travel, or it can take a breakdown, or it can take coming out of one, to heighten our awareness of the worldās absurdity and transcendence. Bob and Charlotteās romance isnāt only with each otherāthe surrounding world is returned to them, the scrim lifting. The difficult becomes funny again, and the commonplace becomes sublime.
This is the gift, still, of Lost in Translation: I turn the movie off and return to my own life, where I find it just a little more shimmering than I left it as if seen through a lens or scored by a soundtrack. I walk to the post office through burnished leaves; I think to put the radio on while doing dishes and sing along. Risk exists in the glorification of any pain, great or small, but what about its end? The daily life, the pleasure of rising to the ordinary world after weeks or months of darkness, could do with a little glorifying.
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Film always argues yes, but life doesnāt. We must make that case for ourselves.
Mairead Small Staid is a poet, critic, and essayist living in Minnesota.