Lost in Translation

[osprey_archer]

Sofia 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. And not just because the leads don’t get together; the leads don’t get together in Cairo Time, either, but I would definitely call that a romantic film. In Cairo Time their connection is transient and they know that it’s transient, and yet it’s meaningful to them and emotionally powerful - whereas Charlotte and Bob’s connection is far more tenuous, sometimes doesn’t even feel like a connection.

They’re not in love. They are slightly more honest with each other than they are with their spouses, but there’s no baring of souls; you get the feeling that they’re both holding back, and why wouldn’t they? They’re chance acquaintances at a hotel and have no reason to feel a deep trust in each other, and they don’t. It’s somewhat ambiguous to what degree they’re even attracted to each other.

But they’re both lonely and isolated and gravitate toward each other because of that, and to the extent that they do manage to jerry-rig some connection to each other - that’s a small thing, but sustaining for them, in this moment.



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?

Comments

[sovay]

But they’re both lonely and isolated and gravitate toward each other because of that, and to the extent that they do manage to jerry-rig some connection to each other - that’s a small thing, but sustaining for them, in this moment.

I saw the movie with my partner at the time (another one for the York Square Cinema, thank you for reminding me!) and we walked out discussing the last line that the audience can't hear: I thought we weren't meant to know what Bob whispers to Charlotte and my partner thought we were supposed to guess. He liked the idea of "Thank you."

The fly in the ointment - and it’s a pretty big fly - is Coppola’s treatment of Japan.

I remember it was jarring for us partly because we couldn't tell how to read it: if the audience was supposed to laugh with or disapprove of the characters or both or what. I'm still not sure, which I suspect means it was unexamined on Coppola's part.

[kore]

I think we're supposed to think Bob is a jerk (look at how he talks to his wife), but the treatment of Japan in the movie does squick me a bit. It's very much about the Lost White People in Japan, not Japan itself. Which is for sure a genre, but....IDK. (In fact I think I own at least two novels about Greece that treat it the same way.) It's also a lovely and haunting movie, so I feel conflicted. I think at the time Japan would have a lot more Japanese people who knew English. It felt like Coppola was making a movie about a Japan she remembered or imagined, more the images in her head. Which is, again, what a lot of artists do! (Oh yeah, the movie Stealing Beauty is kind of like that, and also lovely.) But it still felt a bit weird.

It's not a romance per se but it reminded me some of a low-key Brief Encounter -- Virginia Woolf once had an idea for a novel which would follow two parallel protagonists who never meet, or only meet once, and that's kind of a fascinating idea. After all IRL we bump off a lot more people than we actually connect with long-term.

I don't think it's a movie about depression exactly -- it's kind of too pastel and whimsical and colourful -- but about realizing you're unhappy. That genius scene where Bill Murray goes on about how he wants to eat food like where he's at now, Japanese food, and not all that PASTA, and you can tell just from the tone of the voice on the phone his wife is saying something like "Well you can cook it then," really encapsulizes it for me. It's not even about food, it's about him wanting to carry novelty and freshness and a different way of being back home with him, wanting to stop feeling stuck and unsatisfied. -- There's also a moment, I'm probably remembering it wrong, where Charlotte's husband busts in and has a bottle or champagne or something and gives it to her and then has to leave, and it all takes less than five minutes and she's sitting there with tears in her eyes and you can tell how abandoned and alienated she feels. IDK, it's so nicely composed of not-so-little moments like that. It's a bit like a filmed New Yorker epiphany-type story. The "Lying in a Hammock at William Duffy’s Farm in Pine Island, Minnesota" thing.

[kore]

There's a moment when they're in the hospital and someone is CLEARLY asking Bob "How long have you been in Japan," and he just Does Not Get It, and the guy cracks up and starts drawing a big clock in the air or something. I really wonder what he's saying right then.

I think an article I read some years after the film really questioned the idea that that kind of hotel wouldn't have an adjustable showerhead or that the ikebana teacher wouldn't be bilingual, but damned if I can remember it. (And when I briefly traveled parts of Portugal and Italy in the very early eighties, people were wild to talk idiomatic English with Americans. They collected slang like it was precious.)

[asakiyume]

Yeah, I couldn't enjoy the film at all because of the whole Japan angle. "I mean these Japanese people sure are weird and incomprehensible amirite?"

As you say, being a foreigner in any country that you don't know and where you don't know the language is isolating--or certainly can be--and it's a good way to locate a film if you want a metaphor for that. But by adding that mockery, it's like there's a sub-message "And furthermore, these people really are weird so it's extra-bad to be isolated *here*, as opposed to France or Germany or Italy."

Or maybe it's just meant to make Bob that much of a jerk, I don't know. But it sure did make me dislike him and not like the movie.

[osprey_archer]

I think he's meant to be a lovable jerk, or at least a "we root for your happiness so you'll be less of a jerk" jerk, or something like that - what's the point of the movie if we're supposed to just think he's a jerk and no wonder he's alone, you know?

But the moments when he's making fun of the Japanese accents or being sarcastic at his hosts (WHO ARE TRYING SO HARD TO MAKE HIM FEEL COMFORTABLE AND WELCOME) really go beyond that into just straight-up jerk category.

[osprey_archer]

He's whispering for an awfully long time just to be saying thank you. But maybe! It's nice that they get to see each other one last time, at least, after that awkward good-bye in the hotel.

[osprey_archer]

I don't know of other books that do this with Japan, but Lost English People in Italy was positively a genre in the early twentieth century, although generally Italy is healing their sense of loneliness and isolation rather than contributing to it. Not actual Italians, you understand, but the sunshine and flowers and more relaxed manners of English people abroad. So there's clearly a long tradition of this sort of thing.

The point of the "depression hurts commercial" thing was not so much that the movie is about depression, but but "this movie is drawing heavily on our established iconography of sadness." Lots of staring out of window scenes. Although honestly I wouldn't call it a very whimsical movie; there are maybe some whimsical images but (aside from the bit where Bob is trying to chat with the older Japanese man in the hospital and they're totally failing, but laughing together, which really is charming) they tend to be alienating, to underscore the fact that Bob & Charlotte are out of place here.

[kore]

-- Oh boy, Room with a View certainly qualifies, doesn't it? Great big field of what is it, gentians? Violets? ....and before that there's Daisy Miller, altho the effect of the Italian air is rather less salutary.

[sovay]

and the guy cracks up and starts drawing a big clock in the air or something. I really wonder what he's saying right then.

Could you tell from the film's subtitles? I ask because The Desert Rats (1953) has dialogue in unsubtitled German and Italian, which turns out to become visible (and translated) if you turn on the subtitles for the film overall. I never tested it with a DVD, but I've seen the transcribed subtitles on the internet since. There might be a similar feature/loophole in Lost in Translation, though given the film's theme maybe not.

(And when I briefly traveled parts of Portugal and Italy in the very early eighties, people were wild to talk idiomatic English with Americans. They collected slang like it was precious.)

Did they get any really good slang from you?

[sovay]

-- Oh boy, Room with a View certainly qualifies, doesn't it? Great big field of what is it, gentians? Violets?

The idea of A Room with a View being part of a genre of the English in Italy is really interesting to me; I read it at the same time as several other novels by Forster and thought it was just his personal thing of People in Landscapes.

[kore]

I don't remember, it's been so long since I saw the film....I have the DVD, somewhere, in here. (picture piles of DVDs bought cut-price on top of the piles of books) Also I don't think I was in the habit of watching with subtitles on when it came out, which we started doing because T has that hearing problem where he can't distinguish sounds from background noise if it's too loud. Maybe they were left untranslated the same way Murray's improvised message was left unheard?

LOL, I don't think so, since I was a total social misfit and like 10 years old! I don't even think the Valley girl song had come out then. I think I had already picked up "man" and "dude" from my father, tho.

[kore]

He has that whole mini-genre of Brits In Italy of his own, doesn't he -- Room with a View, Where Angels Fear to Tread and I think a nonfiction book, definitely his early short stories -- IIRC I read in a biography where he travelled alone to Italy and it unlocked his creative imagination and he felt freer, so he put that in his fiction.

-- I remembered right for once, it was indeed violets. I think in the film it's a field of poppies, a bit more fitting? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=US1isbaN38I

[thawrecka]

I remember choosing this movie to watch on DVD because I was nostalgic for my trip to Japan and just being so offended and tired by its treatment of Japan as this place of wacky accented short people who deserve to be mocked. The 'rip my stockings' bit just made me angry.

I've had people passionately defend this to me because they feel it's just about the loneliness and feeling like an outside and could be set anywhere - but I can't imagine Coppola making a film where the comedy was making fun of the height and accents and culture of, say, Sweden.

[brigdh]

Ugh, yeah, the treatment of Japan in this movie really bothered me too. I could identify with the feeling of isolation, but neither of the main characters seemed to actually want to do anything about it: learn some Japanese, interact with the culture, talk with strangers, etc. They just seemed to want to wallow in their alienation, which erased any pity I might have had for them.

[osprey_archer]

TBF I think both of them are in Japan for like a week, so they probably wouldn't get very far in learning Japanese in that amount of time. But still. They could at least try to make the most of sightseeing opportunities! At least try something a little more active than sitting in the windowsill gazing out at the city through a pane of glass.