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The DVD of Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation
includes an extra titled "Matthew's Best Hit TV." It's
a five-minute clip of Bob Harris (Bill Murray) on a Japanese talk
show, where he is ambushed by the hyperbolically campy host. In
the film, we see only a few moments of this sequence -- Bob looking
wary of the host's wild gesticulations and rapid-fire Japanese --
but the unedited scene is far more awkward. Shot on video rather
than 35mm, the scene resembles the sort of bad SNL skit that Murray
might have suffered through in his early career. The only bit of
charm comes at the end, when an exasperated Bob abandons decorum
and stuffs a live eel down the host's suit jacket. This moment rescues
a scene that is otherwise a series of cheap shots set against a
mesmerizing, colorful background. That is, Lost in Translation
in a nutshell.
While Murray is undeniably excellent as a slumping,
has-been action star, and Lance Accord's cinematography infuses
the film with a fetching, quiet beauty, the rest of Lost in
Translation is as transparently thin as the pink panties that
Charlotte (Scarlet Johansson) strips down to whenever she decides
to stare wistfully out of her Park Hyatt window. (About those pink
panties: one can't help but notice that Charlotte actually sheds
clothes to take her perch. Is there an overactive heating vent beneath
the window ledge? Or is her privileged quarter-life crisis so overwhelming
that she has to strip in order to free her ennui? It is either one
of the film's great existential enigmas or a shameless acknowledgement
that Charlotte's gauze-wrapped bum makes a reliably eye-catching
shot.)
Lost in Translation is awash in such arresting
visual moments. A 20-story brontosaurus lumbers across the facade
of a Shibuya office building. A neon kaleidoscope skates across
Charlotte's taxi window. Rows of blinking red lights sigh across
the Tokyo skyline. Accord portrays Japan's uber-metropolis as an
enticing ocular playground where every shadow is inviting, every
light a beacon, and the hues put a rainbow to shame.
But this vision of Tokyo is affecting because it's
recognizable: since Japan's rise to economic power in the '80s,
Hollywood movies have endlessly recycled Tokyo as high-tech dystopia.
And Coppola's movie reads like a playlist of Tokyo's Greatest Hits:
blinking pachinko machines? Check. Wood-paneled shabu shabu booth?
Got that. Demure ikebana flower arrangers? Yup. Modernist girlie
bar with contortionist strippers? Oh yeah.
It's all familiar background, made from postcards
and stock extras who all stand 5'6", slur their "L's"
into "R's," and chatter incomprehensibly like so many
small children. True, it would undermine the whole "lost in
translation" theme if Coppola provided subtitles for the monolingual,
English-speaking audience, but in encouraging viewers to feel as
stranded as Bob and Charlotte, she also has them adopt their troubling
view of Tokyo as an exotic yet tiresome playground.
The common defense of the film's orientalism is that
Tokyo is "just a backdrop," that Coppola is not trying
to make a "statement" about Japan, its culture or its
people. But this excuse fails to acknowledge the ways in which Japan
(and Asia writ large) has long served as a stage set where white
people play out their existential dilemmas. In the last six months
alone, Tom Cruise traveled to feudal Japan to rediscover his honor
in Dances with Shoguns, and Uma Thurman flew into Tokyo
to avenge her stolen past in Kill Bill, Vol. 1. In Japanese
Story, though Toni Collette finds herself in her native Australia,
co-star Gotaro Tsunashima conveniently serves as a one-man distillation
of Nippon's inscrutable mystery.
Lost in Translation one-ups its peers with
better music, prettier shots, and a more charismatic lead, but its
racism is all the more insidious for being wrapped in a pleasing
package. It exchanges the Rising Sun /Black Rain
/we-can't-trust-these-slant-eyed-Japanese-bastards racism for a
racism of sheer laziness: trotting out one-dimensional caricatures
of wacky Tokyo hipsters and cheap gags like the call girl who keeps
commanding Bob to "rick my stockings!" long after the
joke has gone from blandly humorous to disturbingly cruel.
That said, there is one scene that exhibits something
approaching humanity. When Bob takes Charlotte to the hospital,
he finds himself engaged in a futile, linguistically challenged
conversation with an elderly Japanese woman in the waiting room.
Their halting pantomimes and onomatopoeic utterances send two women
seated behind them into a fit of giggles. By placing the laughter
on screen, Coppola unseats the sense of superiority inherent in
Bob's alienation. Rather than a bemused outsider, he becomes part
of the joke; the Japanese are laughing at him, too. The DVD offers
another version of the scene: Bob abandons any attempt to understand,
putting his arm around his waiting room neighbor's shoulder in a
silent gesture of camaraderie. In that moment, they're both lost
in translation, and their connection, as they agree to misunderstand,
is far more affecting than any other in the film, including Bob
and Charlotte's.
The two leads do share some touching moments of tenderness,
but their relationship hinges on the shaky premise that we are supposed
to care about them. The film assumes we'll feel sympathy for Charlotte's
"I don't know what I'm doing with my life/marriage!" laments
and Bob's slow descent into faded glory and chilly family life.
However, it's difficult to work up the requisite sympathy for a
snotty Yale graduate and a wealthy movie star who spend their sleepless
nights pouting in the hotel bar and taking midnight swims in the
indoor pool.
Star-crossed and unconsummated lovers, Bob and Charlotte
deserve each other, not just because they're lost and lonely, but
also because they're both too self-centered to see the world around
them. Wrapped in the myopia of whiteness and American cultural privilege,
they fail to see the humanity of the city and people around them.
In one of the DVD's other deleted scenes, Charlotte
walks into a random store off the main Tokyo strip. In it, she glances
at some bondage photos of Japanese women, then walks over to where
two robots, a "boy" and a "girl," roll over
to her, briefly looking up at her with lifeless eyes. They "see"
but don't recognize Charlotte in any meaningful way. She's merely
an object they sense in front of them, worthy of a quick investigation
but nothing more. It's an ironic allegory for Lost in Translation
itself, a swirl of titillating yet fleeting postcard images and
people who glance at one another but never connect.
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