Introduction
When I first watched Sofia Coppola’s melancholic Lost in Translation, I had no means of relating to it. I was in my mid-teens, hadn’t yet left the security of my hometown, and only knew the wonder of distant cities in short bursts of vacation time. Despite its beauty and tact, the film didn’t touch me — I didn’t understand why.
Years later in 2018, sulking in my dimly lit apartment in Barcelona, I thought it might be time to revisit it. Because maybe now I could understand, maybe leaving home at 18 and moving not just to a student building or house in a nearby town but to another country had awakened an ability to connect with a story about an older man and a young woman navigating a city they couldn’t possibly know — a city that brought up existential reflection and questions about their place in the world.
Adaptation
Living somewhere you have no connection to makes you a nobody, it renders you new and without background — one of the most freeing things a person can do. But in that physical freedom and a fresh start, there’s wandering of the mind. Staring out large windows and remembering you are voiceless in a sea of millions, admiring the beauty of the buildings and lights but being fearful of their neutrality toward you. You could disappear entirely into the crowd and without a sound. The world is still, and you’re moving through the bustle like a hazy signal leftover from something before. Something real, but not quite tangible. A soul with no weight to it — you may as well be a ghost. Yet there are small moments of integration, where the surroundings begin to be less clinical and impersonal. You look for comfort in the only thing left that could bring it: people. Suddenly, they are everything.
For Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), the same is true. In moments like Charlotte attending a flower arranging group with locals, she looks at people speaking and understands nothing, but kindness transcends words and she can feel as if she might belong temporarily because of a small thing like a smile. The highs are higher and the lows are lower when you’re living a new life; when every interaction is either validating or disorienting.
I remember my first and last drive through Barcelona, sitting in the back of a taxi with a driver I could not talk to in any real depth. I looked at every window, person, and car. When I first arrived, I went through a days-long adaptation process. In my writing, I described the home-sickness as a depression that focused all its attention on faux nausea. People often move far away looking for catharsis, meaning, and purpose, but instead realise that no matter where you are, you’re the same and life isn’t a movie. But the experiences, good and bad, allow self-reflection. They might even allow a person to connect to a piece of art in a way they couldn't have before.
The Beauty of Being Alone
Lost in Translation is special in the sense that we get to experience another person’s solitude in a mundane way. It’s something we don’t often see, and even if people tell us how they feel, you don’t usually get to breathe it in the way Coppola allows us to here. Where others may have seen pointless wallowing in space, Coppola sees clarity and the truth of the fact that we are the most “us” when we’re alone. There is only one constant companion in life, one that cannot be lost: the voice in our heads every second of every day. Bob and Charlotte’s individual downtime between meet-ups are followed carefully and is just as meaningful in the film’s narrative as the time they spend together.
Charlotte gazes out of her hotel room window at Tokyo — beautifully captured by Lance Acord’s subtle cinematography. She came with her boyfriend, a successful photographer. She’s not successful, she’s just there. Charlotte, like so many young people, is having difficulty with finding her place. Watching her boyfriend leave every day to go to work while she stays in bed or aimlessly wanders is reminiscent of the feeling of worthlessness during unemployment, or that god awful gap between college and your first full-time job where it feels like you’re learning everything there is to learn about real life all at once. It can even be traced back to melancholic childhood summers when school was out for summer and it felt like you had done everything there was to do in the world, but there were still 3 weeks left of it. To get up and start something new seemed too much effort, whereas sitting in the living room of my childhood home for days on end watching beams of sunlight come through the window, illuminating the dust in the air and warming the carpet where the light touched it, suspended time for what felt like forever.
Crossing Paths
Although at very different places in their lives, the characters in the film both share the same displacement. Bob is a wilting movie star, in Japan for business. He flutters awkwardly around coordinators at his hotel and shoots a commercial that frustrates him due to a lack of communication with the director. In instances like these, Lost in Translation’s title can be taken literally and at face value — but the title can also be found in a more subtle way in the depths of Bob and Charlotte’s budding relationship. Their connection is indecipherable in an unusual and satisfying manner, not strictly platonic but not solely romantic either. They talk for hours on end but don’t seem to say much. The reading between the lines of their jokes and stories is what builds their bond. And it’s not until the end of the film that they’re ready to express what they mean clearly. For a while, they just stare at each other, then give a goodbye as if they were just acquaintances because they don’t know what else to say. When Charlotte catches up with Bob after their first goodbye, they share one final moment. Charlotte whispers something in his ear, but we can’t hear it. It’s just for them, one moment of pure and direct communication. Somehow, it seems right that it should just be for them. To hear it would be stealing it, like listening in on a call you know you shouldn't be.
In the second half of the film, Bob and Charlotte contend with loss and the finite reality of things. After a meaningful block of time together, they sense it coming to an end in the same way you can sense the end of a long road trip. A few hours ago, you were desperate to get back home; but now, there’s something rather sad about having to turn the radio off and get back out into the world. See, even if your new circumstances weren’t perfect, there’s still something particularly dreadful about the day you leave. You find yourself considering staying, which is madness, but occasionally a friendship or a romance help to surpass hardships. There’s no right answer and you can ask the same question every day with no new conclusions: do I stay or do I go?
Parts of Lost in Translation left me cold, but as Bob makes his way back to the airport and the camera starts to pick up the beauty of Tokyo as if he were truly seeing it for the first time, just to add to the bitterness of leaving, I couldn’t help but cry for him. The person he feels like he might belong with is in a place he cannot belong to. Perhaps even worse a sting — maybe he can, but simply isn’t brave enough to find out. We are all destined to travel back home (whether it be physically or by raking through photographs and memories), we convince ourselves we should. It’s the eternal “what if I stayed?” that holds the most weight.
