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For those of you who don't frequent the journals, here's what I had to say about this film after returning from the theater:
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Lost in Translation - is a perfect film
Yes, that’s what I think.
I’ve been to Tokyo and I’ve always said it is the most desperately repressed, lonely, and alienated city I’ve ever seen. Of course, its appearance is quite the opposite. It looks just like a fun place. That would be my point. Enough said about my recollection of Tokyo.
That it is the backdrop for this film is as it should be. The film is about loneliness, repressed desire, and the disconnect between what we are externally (culture) and what we are internally (a mystery, especially to ourselves).
Bill Murray plays a character much like himself – an ageing movie star who doesn’t have the looks to be a romantic lead. Scarlett Johansson also plays a character much like herself (minus the movie star aspect) – a young woman who is experiencing full adulthood with all of its contradictory and frustrating realities.
She is finding out that her world has become more circumspect than she ever might have imagined. He is full of the realizations that ensue from living such an interior life for decades – even while possessing fame and its attendant wealth.
They meet through a series of meaningless coincidences and spend a few externally meaningless days in a meaningless place. What we come to grasp however is how deeply meaningful all of this becomes to them. The tension between the utter emptiness of the external situation vis-à-vis their inner experience is the film’s content. Although highly understated it is conveyed deliberately and with assuredness by both actors.
The title says it all. Everything is lost in translation. The meaning of things is lost in the myriad of translations of things as we experience them. Translations between life and media, nature and culture, age and youth, desire and experience - yield not meaning but the absence of meaning.
The film is so true to the inner life of human beings that it’s amazing it was made. Even more amazing is how thoroughly entrancing it is (notice I didn’t say “entertaining”).
I’m also always encouraged to see a piece of work in which the brainless but spectacular worlds of popular culture and mass media are taken down a few notches and revealed to be the vapid excuses for a good time they truly are. Tokyo is a fitting symbol for all of this. As I see it, the only thing worse than visiting the place would be having to live there.
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