Bob Harris: Bill Murray
Charlotte: Scarlett Johansson
John: Giovanni Ribisi
Kelly: Anna Faris
Commercial director: Yutaka Tadokoro
15 September 2003
by Jasmine Park
One of the most troubling recent trends to emerge in film criticism is the divide being built, film by film, between the work of male and female directors. To bestow praise on the work of any female directors working today is often merely a way of saying that they play awfully well in the minor leagues. What is even more worrisome is that so few of these directors have spoken out against such blatant sexism. Sophia Coppola is one of many up-and-coming women directors, and the New York Times Magazine recently called her "the most original and promising young female filmmaker in America," as though this were, of all things, a compliment. Unfortunately, her filmmaking only reinforces why critics would qualify her work as such.
From its opening credits, which appear slowly in pale blue letters over the image of a woman's buttocks in repose and clothed in pink panties, Lost in Translation could not display the hand of a woman more unequivocally. Set in Tokyo, Bob Harris (Bill Murray), a has-been Hollywood actor, arrives to shoot a Suntory whiskey commercial. While staying alone at the Park Hyatt, he soon notices another hotel guest, Charlotte (Scarlett Johannson), a 22-year-old Yale graduate who is visiting the city with her Weezer-lookalike husband (Giovanni Ribisi, in one of his few roles that genuinely suit him), a professional photographer caught up in his work and ignorant of his wife's increasing unhappiness. Isolated by the foreignness of their surroundings and by their dismal marriages, Bob and Charlotte drift towards each other in a slow courtship over the course of a week. They go to parties, sing karaoke, and eat sushi together, all the while barely resisting the urge to consummate an obvious attraction to one another.
Lost in Translation recalls other films of love found and lost, including Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise (1995), Claude Sautet's Nelly et Monsieur Arnaud (1995), and Wong Kar-Wai's In the Mood for Love (2000), which was elegantly saturated in unspoken emotion. But fiction seems much better suited for this type of story; unrequited love is tough medicine for the film audience's desire for visceral pleasure, whereas this kind of heartache can be expressed so eloquently and moodily in language (Haruki Murakami has created an entire genre of it). Instead, Lost in Translation comes off with the distinct feeling of a daydream the director likely had while traveling herself in Tokyo, and indeed, in the very same hotel where our protagonists meet. In the same way that her wildly overrated debut, The Virgin Suicides (1999), was too preciously connected to the dreamy nostalgia of adolescent boys for beautiful and mysterious neighborhood girls, Lost in Translation is clearly based upon the fantasies of the young lost female more in love with the idea of intellectual connection than sexual liberation. If Last Tango in Paris (1972) was the midlife crisis dream of men, Lost in Translation is the prototypical mid-20s crisis fantasy of young, thoughtful women.
I do not claim that Lost in Translation is awful, but I fault it for not being as good as it could have been. Its best moments are almost entirely to the credit of Bill Murray, who gives a gorgeously nuanced performance. I never imagined he could be this good. Even in his two best previous films, Groundhog Day (1993) and Rushmore (1998), Murray always displayed that sarcastic upturn of a smile, the slightly condescending expression, the minor adjustments that make us laugh even in his earnest moments - he seems incapable of stating a profound thought without a little 1-2-3 punch to tide the seriousness over with humor. Yet his trademark moves have been replaced in total by lovely honesty, and I give credit to any director capable of eliciting such a heartfelt performance from him. However, the film makes so many other glaring missteps, the worst of which are those when Murray is allowed to fall back on his goofy physical-comedy schtick, including grappling with a showerhead too short for his Western stature or a furious Japanese elliptical machine. The restraint Coppola seems to practice in some scenes is utterly diminished by her bafflingly amateurish choices in others, so that I question the validity of assuming that only she could have gotten this performance out of him. And Scarlett Johansson, in spite of her passing resemblance to the director, only barely registers as Charlotte; I kept thinking that Coppola herself, with her strange birdlikeness, ought to have gone the Woody Allen route and played her own thinly veiled self in the film.
Based upon her two films, Coppola appears to be following in the unfortunate footsteps of Cameron Crowe, who, as David Denby wrote in his New Yorker review of Vanilla Sky (2001), needs to start all over and see why he should be a director in the first place, except that Coppola has yet to make a great film. Lost in Translation exudes the kind of memoir quality that should be reserved only for the finest directors who have reached a particular seasoned period in their illustrious careers and want to backtrack to intimacy - films like Bergman's The Best Intentions (1992), Kurosawa's Madadayo (1993), David Lynch's The Straight Story (1993), and Zhang Yimou's The Road Home (1999), whose minor, overly precious qualities are justified by their placement in long lines of far better, more ambitious films. But Coppola has no such filmography to rely upon to reinforce the quality of what is only her sophomore work. In a recent interview with the Washington Post, she was quoted as saying that Lost in Translation, which she wrote and directed, was made for "me and my friends," and indeed, it may succeed on that modest level, but hardly any other. Interestingly, before venturing into filmmaking, Coppola dabbled in a number of other artistic pursuits, including photography, which both she and her heroine, Charlotte, deride as the cliché pursuit of lost artistic women; yet I would not be surprised to find that Coppola's photographs were very much of the same earnest but forgettable quality as her films. Lost in Translation is suffused with the emotions and thoughts of its director, but unfortunately none of them are inspiring enough to be original, or have not been stated more eloquently elsewhere. Coppola will never be a great director, or achieve the kind of stature reserved and not yet achieved by any female director in the history of film. In other words, she has none of the promise of, for example, her husband, Spike Jonze, who only gets better, more daring, more ambitious, with each film. And while it may seem unfair to ask her to be, would it not be unfair to never wonder if she could?
Focus Features presents a film written and directed by Sofia Coppola. Running time: 105 minutes. Rated R (some sexual content).
Scarlett Johansson and Bill Murray
in Lost in Translation.
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