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Lost in Translation
Feb. 27th, 2018 05:55 pmSofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation is a weird movie. I feel like I say this about all of Coppola’s movies, although admittedly I haven’t seen them all, but this one is weird for much the same reason that Marie Antoinette is weird, which is that it’s not so much interested in what one might call a “plot” or even in character development. It’s an exploration of a mood or a state of being, of different ways of visually representing that mood, and in this case that mood is loneliness.
“This looks like one of those depression hurts commercials,” I commented to Julie, as Scarlett Johanson yet again sat in the windowsill gazing listlessly at the glass.
So, yeah, there’s a certain element of cliche in some of the individual images Coppola chooses. The movie rises above that cliche because it commits to the characters’ loneliness in a way that movies rarely do: this is not just a transient state that will set up why the characters need this romance. They’re lonely and isolated and they might become slightly less isolated but… maybe not.
I chose Lost in Translation for this month because I’ve seen it billed as a romance, but although there are romantic elements, it’s not really a romance at all. ( Spoilers )
The fly in the ointment - and it’s a pretty big fly - is Coppola’s treatment of Japan. It feels like the movie is set in Japan mostly because it highlights the main characters’ loneliness to surround them with people they literally can’t understand, and actually that doesn’t bother me too much - if I were watching a movie to learn about Japan I’d watch something that’s actually Japanese, you know? And you could get the same effect by setting the movie in France or Greece or any non-English speaking country, really.
What does bother me is that it feels like Coppola chose Japan because she found the Japanese accent when speaking English inherently hilarious. There’s one particularly labored scene that hinges on the distinction between the words “lip” and “rip,” but it pops up again and again in the movie, like Coppola finds this so fascinating that she just can’t let it go. It seems small and mean-spirited.
And it makes Bob in particular look like a jerk. He’s a fading movie star who is being paid two million dollars to make a commercial in Japan, and he’s surrounded by people who are very politely speaking English to him while he’s in their country (and he clearly can’t speak Japanese a quarter as well as they speak English) so you’d think he could at least refrain from mocking their accents, right?
“This looks like one of those depression hurts commercials,” I commented to Julie, as Scarlett Johanson yet again sat in the windowsill gazing listlessly at the glass.
So, yeah, there’s a certain element of cliche in some of the individual images Coppola chooses. The movie rises above that cliche because it commits to the characters’ loneliness in a way that movies rarely do: this is not just a transient state that will set up why the characters need this romance. They’re lonely and isolated and they might become slightly less isolated but… maybe not.
I chose Lost in Translation for this month because I’ve seen it billed as a romance, but although there are romantic elements, it’s not really a romance at all. ( Spoilers )
The fly in the ointment - and it’s a pretty big fly - is Coppola’s treatment of Japan. It feels like the movie is set in Japan mostly because it highlights the main characters’ loneliness to surround them with people they literally can’t understand, and actually that doesn’t bother me too much - if I were watching a movie to learn about Japan I’d watch something that’s actually Japanese, you know? And you could get the same effect by setting the movie in France or Greece or any non-English speaking country, really.
What does bother me is that it feels like Coppola chose Japan because she found the Japanese accent when speaking English inherently hilarious. There’s one particularly labored scene that hinges on the distinction between the words “lip” and “rip,” but it pops up again and again in the movie, like Coppola finds this so fascinating that she just can’t let it go. It seems small and mean-spirited.
And it makes Bob in particular look like a jerk. He’s a fading movie star who is being paid two million dollars to make a commercial in Japan, and he’s surrounded by people who are very politely speaking English to him while he’s in their country (and he clearly can’t speak Japanese a quarter as well as they speak English) so you’d think he could at least refrain from mocking their accents, right?
