Lost In Translation

by Shari L. Rosenblum

Softness and subtlety mark the essence of Lost in Translation, a film that takes as its premise the impossibilities of human communication and then tells a story that transcends them. Written and directed by Sofia Coppola (The Virgin Suicides), it weaves a thread of unflinching intimacy through a tapestryof impenetrable alienation with a sure hand and a keen eye, maintaining throughout its running time the intense lightness of an urgent whisper or a stolen wisp of a kiss.

An aging American movie star bordering on has-been and emotionally estranged from his wife, Bob Harris (Bill Murray) is in Tokyo bartering his image for a well-paying whiskey ad campaign. He arrives in the city's garish night glare and gazes up at a billboard of his own image staring down at him; it is an outward manifestation of his inner dislocation, and the camera focuses, but does not dwell on it. Welcomed into the Tokyo Park Hyatt, greeted and gifted by hosts and guests, he exudes a sense of aloneness. Exhausted, he cannot sleep. Coppola's lens catches him in contrast and misunderstanding - comical, even when clichéd - and always poignant. Murray is pitch perfect.

Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a recent Yale graduate still searching for a beginning, is in Tokyo with her husband, a mover/shaker photographer (Giovanni Ribisi), and out of sync with his celebrity calling. We first find her, too, in a state of physical displacement as internal echo - far from the bed in which her husband sleeps snoring, silently pressed in near silhouette at the hotel window, as small against the vast Tokyo lights as Bob Harris is tall among the Japanese masses. Johansson is luminous.

Quietly, in the sleepless nights, Bob and Charlotte come to recognize each other as kindred souls, wandering, searching, and hoping to be found. With thirty odd years difference between them, they connect as if in time suspended. They come together in tempered exuberance, in an inexpressible desperation to navigate the foreignness that engulfs them. Theirs is not a sexual bond, but a sensual one - the embracing, intellectual, sardonic, heady bond of the shared moment and the complemented sensibility. Rare, indefinable, unrepeatable. And it makes you laugh out loud.

The plot is somehow sparser than the film - they cross each other's paths and consciousness, they meet and spend some time together, awkwardly, achingly, bending closer and pulling apart, and nothing more. But there is something more. It is the opposite of one of the film's most humorous scenes - where torrents of Japanese words are translated into short precise English sentences. Simple phrases, simple moments translate into great profundities. And never take themselves too seriously: marriage, children, love, life, a touch, a glance, each other. Coppola's writing gently grazes the harshness of her settings - both physical and emotional -- and then brazenly, but with a smile, tiptoes behind them, lifting the veils and lead vests meant to conceal and to protect.

The vulnerability that results is not mocked here, but nurtured - openness as risk rewarded. And for all the words and customs that get lost in translation, what Bob and Charlotte find is what's beyond words. And what we're left with is precisely that - words that do not reach our ears, but that we understand most perfectly.

Lost somewhere from the page to screen is a different sort of culture shock - the kind that confronts the six mothers in search of a child in John Sayles' Casa de los Babys. The cast is impressive: Marcia Gay Harden, Daryl Hannah, Mary Steenburgen, Lili Taylor, Maggie Gyllenhaal, and Susan Lynch are would-be moms come from the States to Latin America to adopt, and Rita Moreno is the matron in charge of the adoptions. The ideas, however, are somewhat muddled.

The film covers the required stay during which the women in waiting have to adapt their American attitudes and expectations to Latin American reality, while the audience gets to see even darker, angrier, sadder pieces of that reality. Sayles seems to want to sympathize with the women, with the plight of the deserving childless, a cross section he has created of the wealthy and the budget-conscious, the bitter and the hopeful, the youthful and the worn, but he nonetheless conveys a sense of disdain for them as well. One can feel him chafe against the way they take for granted that they can take for money the children of the land. It seems an urging for us to question whether they are worthy in themselves - whether they deserve the privilege of trading dollars for "babys," pronounced in the American way. And he has them catty and disrespectful of each other, as well.

In the meantime, on the streets of the city, children far too young steal and drug themselves to sleep, unable to read, while children just a slight bit older become mothers-to-be of the babies-to-be-adopted by some other American wannabe moms. It is a terrifyingly hopeless cycle, and Sayles seems to want to point a finger, to cast blame. But where? On whom?

The sadness and hope on both sides of adoption, both sides of the border, are lost in translation here. Sayles’s touch is far more heavy-handed than that of Coppola, yet his film manages to say much less.

©2003 Shari L. Rosenblum
CineScene