5.27.2004
Lost in Translation
My plot description makes "Lost in Translation" sound a lot sappier than it is. It's a beautiful, quiet movie, that allows its characters to just exist, rather than be driven by the inevitability of plot. Instead, we follow them as they go aimlessly through the pachinko parlors and drug parties and karaoke bars and restaurants.
Luckily for us, Coppola made sure that it's such a pleasure to be with these people. Bob's sarcastic sense of humor (which seems to go over everyone's head in Japan) instantly appeals to Charlotte and her post-collegiate not-quite-cynicism. And Charlotte's unformedness and curiosity is appealing to Bob, who is so used to marriage that he and his wife use international long distance to discuss the carpet samples that his wife Fed Exes to Japan.
And because it doesn't follow the same plot that movies about men and women friends so often do, it becomes a meditation on how the right people will bring out the best in us and how joyful these aimless connections are.
(Spoiler below, so stop reading, if you don't want to know the end.)
I do think that Roger Ebert had the wrong take between the hushed exchange between Charlotte and Bob. Stennie and I once amused ourselves for five minutes imagining what he whispered to her. "Call me when you get to LA." "What happens here, stays here." Or, as I've read on the always-accurate Internet, "Tell him the truth."
Ebert says they "deserved" their privacy. How exactly do two fictional characters that we've followed for 90 minutes earn their privacy? They wouldn't exist if not for us staring at them.
I prefer look at what purpose the whisper serves in the story. Coppola builds up the tension in Bob and Charlotte's penultimate meeting. With Charlotte's reaction to the inaudible whisper, Coppola resolves the tension without resolving the story. How genius is that?
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