I have a new phone. It is small and therefore finicky. When I use it I feel like my hands are too big for the job, like I’m King Kong trying to undo the clasps on Fay Wray’s brassiere, only sorta less dirty and hairy. Hmm, maybe that’s a bad metaphor.
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Cal and I saw Lost in Translation last week. One thing I’m kinda struck by, on reading the coverage and reviews, is how no-one seems to be talking about what’s abundantly obvious to me – Sofia Coppola has based the entire movie on one of her early-teen fantasies. The whole setup is straight out of an intimacy fantasy typical of a daydreaming twelve-year-old girl: the young, pure girl-woman given the opportunity by contrived circumstances to interact with an older, famous movie star who is himself looking for a deep emotional connection, and they spend lots of time together, clearly fall for each other, but do not act on their feelings because they cannot escape their respective cages (and also so the fantasy remains, essentially, pure). It’s the kind of chaste romance a 12 year old girl would imagine for herself.
I don’t think it’s a stretch to read the limbo of jetlag Tokyo as symbolic of the cusp between childhood and adult, where one becomes aware of a new kind of intimate connection between self and other and imagines what it must be like without including sexuality.
After all, Sofia Coppola spent her whole life on film sets, staying in hotels and meeting famous actors. Her films have revealed her to be exactly the kind of imaginative and sensitive person who would write long diary entries filled with yearning for something not entirely understood. I think it’s extremely unlikely she never had the kind of fantasy this film is a development of.
Of course, she’s smart enough as an adult to ground the film without destroying the character of its fantasy. Bill Murray’s character sleeping with the chanteuse is a perfect example – an awareness that the fantasy character is not fully real, and in reality such a person would have a surplus of energy that had to go *somewhere*.
The final stroke of genius, of course, was the final interaction between the two. Sofia Coppola has put a private (if not unusual or uncommon) fantasy into the public domain, but kept the keystone to herself.
I really liked this movie, by the way.