Sofia Coppola Wins with Lost
By Kate Brokaw
A&F Associate

The most intimate moment in Sofia Coppola’s breathtaking Lost in Translation is a chaste, fully-clothed, single human touch. It’s a wordless shot, an overhead view of a quiet connection between a hand and a foot. But like the rest of Coppola’s film, it is exquisite.

There is an elegiac, languid quality to much of Lost in Translation, and a sense that both nothing and everything are happening in the smallest of intertwined scenes. Set in Tokyo, this story of a convergence between an unlikely pair– Bob (Bill Murray), an aging, on-his-way-out movie star, and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a recent Yale graduate– layers its scenes into a slow-building portrait of two lost individuals who, together, find that they need no translation.

Bob has come to Japan with a two-million dollar contract to endorse a whiskey he has never tasted. While his wife at home sends him carpet samples and guilt-inducing familial reminders, he struggles with hilariously confusing acting directions translated from a language he cannot understand. Charlotte has accompanied her hip, detached photographer husband (Giovanni Ribisi) overseas, but does little while he goes off on his shoots except to lie in bed and try to make sense of soul-searching self-help tapes. Both unable to sleep, Bob watches his own dated movies on late-night Japanese television, while Charlotte sits in the dark on her window ledge and watches the quiet city.

It is at the hotel bar that the two finally meet. Charlotte admits to Bob that she still doesn’t know what she wants to do with her life, but she is also quick to challenge his own sense of direction, sarcastically assuring him that he is “probably just having a midlife crisis.” Bob is many decades her senior, and yet there is an immediate connection between the two foreigners, an instantaneous recognition, perhaps, of a need to escape their self-inflicted isolation.

This is Coppola’s second effort as both writer and director, three years after her lovely, lyrical adaptation of The Virgin Suicides, Jeffrey Eugenides’ novel of suburban teenage longing. Although that film lost a sense of the book’s dark obsession, it also revealed a deep understanding, on Coppola’s part, of the ephemeral nature of even the most devastating relationships. Lost in Translation is equally infused with this kind of longing, but it is a less distant and much more emotionally transcendent film.

Just as importantly, this is a film made with great care and technical craft, as Coppola again displays her ability to capture the intricacies of setting and human character with a quietly artistic hand. Through her eyes, Tokyo becomes a study of contrasts, as scenes of neon, glittering billboards and garishly loud video game halls are interspersed with serene portraits of the city’s surroundings. Lance Acord’s photography is delicate and unobtrusively beautiful, but the film’s sound draws the most attention, as the alternating noise and silence of the city is layered with a melancholic soundtrack by, among others, Air, The Jesus and Mary Chain, and a pulled-out-of-seclusion Kevin Shields of My Bloody Valentine.

Despite this overwhelming sense of melancholy, Lost in Translation is also unflinchingly hilarious, full of both physical comedy and the confused verbal exchanges of literally being lost in translation. There is a great shot of Bob towering over an elevator full of Japanese businessmen, and an (admittedly clichéd) running joke about the Japanese inability to pronounce an ‘R’ sound that succeeds purely on the strength of Murray’s hopeless bewilderment. “Lip your stockings?” he repeats, flummoxed, to an overaggressive call girl.

And as Bob and Charlotte run around the city, a exhilarating sense of dizziness is also established, as they rebel in a shared freedom that neither one has been able to achieve alone. At one point, Charlotte invites Bob out on the town with local friends, and the drunken group ends up in a karaoke booth overlooking the city; donning a pink Louise Brooks wig, Charlotte lends a seductive edge to the Pretenders’ “Brass in Pocket,” while Bob responds with an off-key but movingly true rendition of Roxy Music’s “More Than This.” There is clearly more than a sense of campiness present as the two watch each other: the surface of the acts seems minor when compared to the inescapable looks in both of their eyes.

In many ways, Bob is an accumulation of every moment of hilarity and honesty that Bill Murray has displayed throughout his entire career. Following quietly stunning roles in such recent films as Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, and Hamlet, with Lost in Translation, Murray has perfected the art of humor-laced sadness, of a sarcastic and world-weary exasperation that is still painfully and humanly vulnerable. Here, he gives an enormously affecting performance as an ex-screen idol who must finally admit to being lost.

But the give-and-take of Bob’s relationship with Charlotte depends on her being able to hold her own as an emotional equal to this man, and it is to her enormous credit that the still-teenage Johansson, with her husky voice and sad eyes, never once allows for a discrediting of this character. Bob may have years of experience on her, but Charlotte has a reserved, self-aware quality beyond her years, and Johansson brings a quiet weightiness to the briefest of exchanges.

In a recent New York Times Magazine profile of Coppola, Lynn Hirschberg notes the filmmaker’s fascination with “moments at the center of which are young women on the verge of something they cannot quite articulate but feel compelled to act upon.” Throughout the film, Coppola repeatedly focuses on an image of Johansson’s singular form in her hotel window, as Charlotte is lost in a moment of solitude in front of the vast expanse of city. Earlier, she has navigated the crowded streets and subways of Tokyo in order to visit temples outside of the city, feeling both a distance from her husband and a displacement from herself. And yet, in a phone call home to a distracted friend, she breaks down in tears, worried that she cannot feel anything.

In the end, it is the devastating emotional undertow of “Lost in Translation” that grounds it most beautifully. At one point late in the film, Charlotte admits that she is stuck, and that she is terrified of life. “The more you know who you are, and what you want,” Bob softy replies, “the less you let things upset you.” And yet he is arguably just as lost and terrified in his own world. A story of two strangers learning to share their singular moments amidst the noise, Lost in Translation ultimately becomes a romance in which sexual intimacy is unnecessary, a love story in the deepest and most unspoken sense. It’s an early call– but this may be the movie of the year.