TWO FROM THE HEART
by Pat Padua

Francis Ford Coppola's One From the Heart was first released twenty-plus years ago. Then, a younger me saw it and was mesmerized by the glamour and film magic, and charmed by what I saw as a simple tale of boy meets girl, boy and girl meet other boy and girl, boy and girl return to each other. Awwww.

Now it's been restored, I'm older, and returning to this film I found an ambivalence I had not seen before. Sure it's romantic - so is Vertigo, which is just one of the classic films visually quoted in One From the Heart. Such references inform the film's imagery, much like the viewer's experience with boys and girls may inform the plot. Citizen Kane and L'Atalante are quoted in the gorgeous title sequence alone: a miniature crane shot hovers and rises from a skylight like Gregg Toland's camera pulled away from (that character's badly acted bad memory); two sets of footsteps in the sand saunter along each other, move apart, and return, leaving their grainy, ephemeral impression. An apt overture for a celebration of the cinematic artifice of romance, the cinematic romance of artifice.

Though visually loaded with Hollywood dew, the acting and dialogue remains naturalistic. Teri Garr and Frederic Forrest are ordinary people living prosaic lives. The smoke and mirrors is provided by the thickly art-directed faux Vegas, where pefectly rain-slicked streets are tossed with perfectly timed tumbleweed (is this a cartoon reference? Where did the ur-tumbleweed blow?). Human glamour is sought, and thought fulfilled, in the persons of Nastassja Kinski and Raul Julia, but they too are ordinary. As Hank (Forrest) first sees Kinski, she argues with her acrobat colleagues in some exotic foreign tongue. When she asks Hank for a cigarette in a slightly accented but not-so-exotic vernacular, the first layer has peeled from the illusion. Raul Julia tells Garr that he plays piano in a club on the strip; when she finds him, he's waiting tables. Who wouldn't beef up their image with dreams - or with cinematographer Vittorio Storaro's rich technicolor?

Thick cinema technique complements the thick, mad psychology of lovers. Rear-projected shots give the impression of movement -- so Forrest can be sitting in a car on a soundstage while a mock landscape passes behind him -- or in this case, around him, as the camera beats the car in almost a full circle. He thinks he's going somewhere, but he's moving in place. This sounds like a terribly bleak picture, doesn't it? Is love only celluloid deep? Well, what are you going to do -- stop going to movies? The conflict may be resolved in the terrific soundtrack. Crystal Gayle has that clean call of glamour, Tom Waits a jaded, affected growl; somehow, oil and water mix. You tell me why it works. I love the movie, really.

From father to daughter. Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation lights on the unusual connection between two adults, from different stages, with little in common save their being lost. This relationship, no more nor less tenuous than any others they have known, is conveyed through sound and image via the collaboration of technicians and actors trying to establish their own relationships. Somehow, it works. Isn't it something that paths of technology and invention, professional and personal, can come together at all?

Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) are both involved in the industry of images, the capture of essence and desire and personality. Charlotte's husband is an up-and-coming photographer, in Tokyo to shoot a rock band. Bob Harris is an actor on the downturn in Tokyo to shoot ads for Suntory, a whisky he's happy to drink, but whose cachet (supplied by his weathered, "intense" testimonial) he finds absurd. "Make it Suntory time." I don't remember seeing contact sheets in the picture, but their roads both seem to ask for such a frame-by-frame distillation, each still image capturing a discrete fleeting moment, moments that cumulatively, at 24fps, suggest motion.

The Japanese are represented with stereotypes of politeness and faux-western hipness; this is how Bob and Charlotte perceive them. The Japanese have their own perceptions of Western culture. In a karaoke bar, protest songs by the Sex Pistols and Elvis Costello bear no more or less cultural weight as ballads by the Pretenders and Roxy Music - they're equally exotic, stripped of any political meaning they may have had (which may as well be true in the West as well: do "God Save the Queen" and "What's so Funny 'Bout ..." retain much threat or passion?).

Charlotte finds her theme in "Brass in pocket": "I'm special -- I'm gonna make you, make yuou, make you no-tice" (I used to think Chrissie Hynde was singing, "make you molten"). Charlotte sings this so meekly; it's a tentative tease to Bob Harris, tentative because she doesn't know who she is that's noticeable. She's finding her voice. Bob, all ham behind the mike, would seem to have found his voice, though the camped emotions -- mock passion for Elvis Costello, mock indifference to Bryan Ferry -- may suggest he's looking as much as she is.

Karaoke filters your voice through someone elses's -- and what is film or photography or any kind of image-capturing art but a slice of the world as seen through your own eyes? What's there to make it stand out, and not lost in the crowd? Lost in Translation suggests a literary translation, but one that not is not only faced with the difficulty of translating meaning between different languages, but within a single language. Understanding isn't as easy as it sounds, and it's kind of remarkable that it ever happens.

©2004 Pat Padua
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