a budding film
...er own right. Here the backstories of the two leads develop in parallel. We hear Bob on the phone to his distracted wife, who is preoccupied with children and carpet samples, as we see Charlotte’s attempts to interest her busy young husband, who is pressured by his work and attracted to Kelly, a vapid visiting actress. (Kelly checks into the hotel under the pseudonym ‘Evelyn Waugh’, which only Charlotte recognises.) Johansson was surely born to listen on screen, her features reacting instantly to Murray’s quirky anecdotes. After an exhausting night on the town (clubs, chases and karaoke), Bob carries Charlotte back to bed as if she were a child and she smiles sleepily as he tucks her in. But thankfully she’s no Lolita. Just as Coppola knows that less is more (a romance can be more moving with barely a kiss exchanged), so Bob knows that a hard-won middle-aged marriage is worth more than a fling with a girl half his age. It’s a moral few movies today are likely to give us. As he walks the hotel corridor back to his room, Murray’s battered face registers desire, disappointment and resignation all at once. Charlotte decorates her room with pink paper cut-outs of traditional cherry blossom, and it’s mainly through her eyes that we see Japan. From her voyeuristic viewpoint at the window she scans the skyline. But soon she descends to the street to fight her way through the crowds. First she takes the crowded subway, all grey and blue. Suddenly she’s in a Buddhist temple, red and gold, with chanting priests. If the Americans are lost in a foreign culture, then that culture itself is dislocated, made up of fragments (ancient and modern, eastern and western) that cannot be joined. The hotel, huge and hermetic, is the clearest example of this in-between space. In the guest rooms extreme luxury is combined with extreme inconvenience. Curtains open automatically at unpredictable times. Fax machines spew noisily at 4.20am. Short beds, low showerheads and tiny razors pose problems for western visitors. The resident jazz group is called Sausalito (after the small town in Northern California) and plays an incongruous version of ‘Scarborough Fair’. The hotel facilities seem perilously suspended above the city: Coppola shoots with the city lights visible far below as Bob has a frenzied encounter with an exercise machine in the gym or attempts a length of the pool while middle-aged matrons perform aquatic gymnastics. But if the hotel is strangely anaesthetic, the labyrinthine city outside is vibrant. The giddiest sequence is when Charlotte and Bob skip across town from one nightclub and karaoke bar to another, climaxing with a Japanese-sung version of the Sex Pistols’ ‘God Save the Queen’. But while the megalopolis may be alienating (Charlotte is repeatedly shot alone in the crowd, a blonde head in a sea of brunettes), it is never threatening. Like Fellini’s Rome in La dolce vita (1960, glimpsed on television in the hotel), Coppola’s Tokyo is a place of pure pleasure, at least for those like the director who know and love it well. During the couple’s night on the town Coppola replays the opening sequence in the cab. But this time it is Charlotte whose face is delicately traced with nocturnal neon. And, unlike Bob at the start of the film, she is no longer a lone passenger. She turns tenderly to watch him doze. So is Lost in Translation’s vision of Japan over-exotic, even racist? There are certainly stereotypes here. Bob is greeted by constant gifts, bows and handshakes. Some comedy comes from linguistic confusion, as in a hilarious piece of farce where Bob grapples with a ‘premium fantasy’ prostitute sent by his employers, who keeps imploring him to “lip” (i.e. rip) her stockings. Some sequences feature untranslated Japanese dialogue which adds to the comic effect. Bob’s appearance on Matthew’s Best Hit TV, a real-life talk show with the campest of hosts, must be much less funny to those who can understand the babble. Japanese television makes an easy and familiar target. But British viewers might be reminded in this scene of our own dear Graham Norton, whose antics no doubt puzzle visiting Japanese immured in Mayfair hotels. Rather than presenting us with foreign clichés, Coppola focuses (as her title suggests) on the process of translation. The verbose instructions of one Japanese photographer are reduced by the interpreter to just three words: “Turn to camera.” Another photographer asks the bemused Bob for a “mysterious face” in a telling reminder that westerners can be mysterious too, that the Japanese are no more inscrutable than ourselves. In fact the cruellest and crudest satire is against Los Angeles. Kelly (Anna Faris) is an asinine Hollywood star promoting her new film in Tokyo. (Smart Charlotte, significantly, was brought up in New York.) Rumoured to be based on Cameron Diaz, the ditzy blonde bombshell claims to feel close to Japan because she loves Buddhism and reincarnation. When Charlotte’s husband confesses to Kelly that he thought she was anorexic, she exclaims, delighted, “Thank you!” Her absurd press conference (“I have so much in common with Keanu”) is followed immediately by Charlotte’s thoughtful encounter with a traditional flower-arranging class, a more promising example of cross-cultural communication. It is a technique of ironic juxtaposition that Coppola uses elsewhere. The day after Charlotte and Bob spend a chaste night on her bed discussing the merits of marriage Charlotte glimpses a traditional wedding in the old imperial capital of Kyoto. Sheltering beneath a huge red parasol and garbed in picturesque costume, the two newlyweds link hands. Charlotte looks on, but no words are needed. Sometimes the most exotic moments are the easiest to translate. Here Lost in Translation links up unexpectedly with The Virgin Suicides once more. The latter’s gauzy cinematography and dreamy score from the band Air (who also contribute to Lost in Translation) make 1970s US suburbia s...