Lost In Translation

Tonight, I went to see the film, Lost In Translation, and I was left with a perplexing thought running through my head as I left the theatre, ventured through the subway, walked the streets to my home: how does one remember not necessarily what they saw during a film, but rather how they felt when the watched it?

Lost In Translation depicts the simple stories of two people.   We are given the lives of an older movie star, popular once, but slow now for jobs, making Japanese commercials to make money when he would rather be working legitimately in his craft and a newly married young woman, following her husband on his photography session in Japan.  That?s the simple part about the film, watching it was completely different.  One might take this film as watching Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson sightsee through the streets of Japan and find it extremely boring.  On the other hand, if one were to not only look at what they see and instead feel their journey as they pass temples, kareoke bars and the hotel bar, they would find a film that would astound you at every turn.  It doesn?t seem like a film, but it does feel like an experience and that is what makes this film moving.

The two actors work beautifully off each other as they make their way through Japan and through a script that is not necessarily filled with rapturous monologues or exquisite dialogue.  The script becomes less of a paint-by-numbers picture and instead finds the actors living the lives they have to depict.  Murray, in a performance less restricted than most of his parts and thusly all the more demanding, portrays a man in crisis who views his life as a big joke.  His sense of whimsy wants to make you laugh out loud until you realize that the place that he is in life is rather quite sad.  That is, until Johansson appears and we are offered a mirror to Murray and the position of confusion he is living.  Her story is at its beginning, but it is a no more happy life than the one he is living.  She is wise beyond her years and yet, she is falling into similar traps that ensnared him years ago.  Does either of these actors tell you this?  No, not really instead they do one better.  They show you this.

As they search this world that constantly confuses them for a way to understand (the main stumbling block is the Japanese language that neither understands well or at all), they are forced to see the greater problem: they don?t understand their own world either, the lives that they are living.  They look at each other with disappointment and dismay and ultimately, the person they are really looking at are themselves.  They are two souls lost in the translation of what their lives mean and the reflection of each other is the only chance to save each other.

There are two images that play in my mind as I finish this review.  One image is a scene when we see Johansson looking out a window, her knees pressed to her chin, scanning over the vastness of Tokyo.  It was reminiscent of Jodie Foster in Contact (one of my favourite films) when she sat on the edge of the Grand Canyon, looking out into the world and the stars and began to see the limitless possibilities.  We see their options and we also seem to see our own for our futures.  The second scene is the end when Bill Murray races after her through the busy streets of the city to see her one last times and whisper something very important in the ear.  We don?t hear what he says, but we know that it is as important as understanding the meaning of life.  Coppola does not reveal what is said in that all too brief whisper, but it echoes inside of us because what we want to hear is what will make our destiny and will make our life find purpose.