Lost In Translation

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.
—
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.

5 thoughts on “Lost In Translation”

  3. Nah man, it happened more recently than that. Obviously you aren’t reading the right gossip columns. 🙂
    They should have revived the anthology movie format before they split. A movie directed by both of those two would be some kind of weirdo film nirvana.

  4. I liked Lost in Translation.
    I didn’t care that no one except for ~m saw it as a rendering of one of Sofia Coppola’s early-teen fantasies. It worked. It was a great story. It made sense. It made Bill Murray into a sexy guy. All in all it was a better movie than all I have seen this year (and most of last year) bar none.
    I especially like the way that I get a good feeling every time I pass advertising or footage for LiT.
    I think that is the best sign that the film was good even if I cvan’t explain exactly why.
    And I want to go to Japan more than ever.
    Actually I just want to go back to Asia. It rocks over there.
    Why can’t I seem to concentrate on writing my CV???

  5. I saw LiT again last week, and have been meaning to comment here since. Because yeah, while I think you can read it as Sofia’s (or Charlotte’s) fantasy, I think it makes just as much sense to read it as Bob’s. Someone somewhere was complaining about the portrayal of the wife as distant and cold, and I think that’s part of the traveling businessman sense of isolation, and then there’s a starry-eyed young thing he can impress and mentor and be romantic with without any major complications. Even the episode with the chanteuse fits, because it adds a certain wry self-deprecation to the point of view, a jadedness.
    Just wanted to add that perspective. 🙂
    Oh, and it definitely bears re-watching.

Comments are closed.