Background media: Scenes from Lost In Translation, directed by Sofia Coppola, (Focus Features, 2003)

Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film Lost In Translation portrays two strangers, Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an aging, famous actor, and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a recent graduate with a degree in philosophy who is accompanying her husband on a work trip to Tokyo. The two strangers stay at the Park Hyatt and much of the film’s narrative revolves around their chance meetings at the hotel and their burgeoning friendship that helped them navigate their jetlagged, Anglophone existence in the Japanese city. 

The film is often described as a (romantic) comedy-drama and, at first glance, the narrative seems indeed much like an innocuous fish-out-of-water story where the two leads’ struggles to fit into their surroundings provide much of the comedic elements while delivering, also, reflections on the characters’ personal turmoils. Viewed in this way, Tokyo could have been any city as long as it was foreign to the main characters as the cinematic city, in this case, serves only to provide an “unfamiliar” backdrop. That being said, this interpretation does not stay as simple or as innocent for long. As one ponders Coppola’s use of Tokyo as a plot device and her methods of defamiliarizing a city even for those to whom the city is familiar, many of her depictions of Japanese culture appears to participate in Hollywood’s Orientalist tradition. For instance, multiple scenes involve awkward encounters between the ambivalent main characters and hypersexualized scenarios involving Japanese characters such as when Charlotte stares at a man reading an explicit comic book on the train, or when an escort was sent to demand Bob to “Lip [her] stockings!”, or, lastly, when both Bob and Charlotte left a strip club where their Japanese friends appear to have settled in comfortably. However, at other times, the characters’ apparent alienation seems to occur independent of their encounters with Tokyo-specific cultural difference. They are often seen fumbling through interactions that are superficial, non-commital, transient forms of urban social encounters that take place under the roof of the hotel. When Charlotte is amused by a female actress’ use of Evelyn Waugh’s name as her alias and, rather than dismissing it, remarks to her husband that Waugh was a man, he criticizes her comment, saying, “Oh, come on, she's nice. What? You know, not everybody went to Yale. It's just a pseudonym, for Christ's sake.” Bob, meanwhile, is shown struggling with adjusting the showerhead’s height, almost falling off the treadmill in the hotel’s gym, and shaving with what looks to be a flimsy and very small disposable razor he has just unwrapped in his temporary bathroom as he looks out onto the Tokyo skyline. Although these scenes seem to have been written to maximize Murray’s comedic talent, the props—common household items and familiar things—emphasize the character’s “otherness” in his environment, an otherness predicated upon his being in a hotel in another country, an otherness that is unmoored from cultural specificities (one can make a tentative claim that grooming is universal)  but one that requires a displacement of the subject all the same.

When asked in the interview what the movie was about, Coppola stated, "It's about these two people lost in their lives and it's exaggerated by being in Japan [...] and finding a brief connection...To me it's just moments in life that are fleeting but the impresson stays with you." With Coppola’s intention in mind, the characters’ “lostness” and their fumbling through their experience in Tokyo seems to be the result of that “protective organ,” to borrow Georg Simmel, which metropolitan individuals develop to protect the psyche from urban overstimulation, which, in the case of the film, is being projected in the figurative and literal first act so that a change could occur in the second act where a brief, meaningful encounter could take place. The hotel, much like a small village to which Simmel often refers, put the characters of Bob and Charlotte in more frequent contact with one another, artificially creating a possibility even under the rationalized mechanism of the modern city to form a connection, “one that is not part of [their] real life,” to use the phrase Coppola used in her interview about the film.

Lost In Translation, in this light, therefore, could be seen as a reaffirmation of the ability for an encounter, however brief it might be, to rupture the protective organ urban dwellers form as they move through their “gray” lives in cities and deactivate the blasé attitude. A rather romantic (if also a little Romantic) speculative reason behind the appeal of such a film is that, perhaps, the film, despite its inaccuracies and biased views of Tokyo, serves as a reminder to many that of the many urban interactions that we often dismiss as insignificant and fleeting, one might have the potential to become meaningful and that this connection cannot be sought out and only found on accident when one least expect it, like when one is feeling lost in a foreign city.