thevoid99's Classic Films # 2 Pt. 3: Lost in Translation
Jul 28 '04 (Updated Jul 30 '04)
The Bottom Line Part 1 of The Analyzation & Textures Behind the Film "Lost in Translation".
thevoid99’s Classics Films # 2: Lost in Translation
Everybody Wants to Be Found Part 3: Seeing Beyond the Screen of Tokyo Pt. 1
Every image in film is filled with something magical. Whether it’s the baby in space in "2001: A Space Odyssey”, Dustin Hoffman yelling “Elaine” in “The Graduate”, a huge ship ready to sink in “Titanic”, Willem Dafoe running in the Vietnamese jungles as he is getting killed with soldiers looking on above in their helicopters in “Platoon”, or Clark Gable saying “Frankly my dear, I don’t give a damn” in “Gone with the Wind”. It’s these images that are the face of cinema that are historically powerful and memorable. Yet in today’s world of greed and superficiality, the Golden Age of cinema is a relic of the past as moviegoers are no longer sure what they want or how they want it. For me though, I finally got what I wanted and more in the lush, colorful images of “Lost in Translation” and it began with its first image.
Now many have stated the first image of a young woman trying to sleep with her behind shown in front of the screen in a see-through like pink underwear is often one of the sexiest images ever shown. Some though, have called it the best opening ever but the comments are very chauvinistic as there are those who saw past that not with its eyes but all of its senses. What I saw, beneath the young woman’s derriere is far more existential and extremely transporting with its noises of airplanes, city noises, calls in Japanese, and everything around her comes out as very confusing. What’s more powerful is what’s amiss and it shows that there’s something far more in depth than seeing a young woman’s *ss. Then, the film’s title “Lost in Translation” appears with that familiar, My Bloody Valentine guitar riff as the movie starts.
There in a cab, tired, lonely, and filled with guilt is Bob Harris to the background music of Death in Vegas’ “Girls”. A man who just entered a new world that immediately, he’s become confused yet intrigued by with its neon-colored lights and high-tech imagery of ads and products in Japanese letters including of all things, a picture of himself holding the whiskey he’s endorsing, Suntori. Here, Harris enters the Hyatt Park Hilton Hotel as his Japanese entourage and those in the hotel greet him while receiving worst news of his middle-aged life, he forgot his son’s birthday. The guilt that Harris is forced to swallow comes at a worse time, especially when his career isn’t as promising as it once was when he began when a couple of Americans were like “You’re Bob Harris” as they told him they loved a movie he did a long time ago. It becomes pretty clear that this is an actor who once had it and then lost it into mediocrity and is forced to come to Japan for $2 million to endorse a whiskey bottle only to support his family that he’s about to lose.
Making things worse is that he couldn’t sleep as he is forced to succumb to jet lag while receiving faxes from his wife on what shelf he wanted and such at around 4 in the morning in Tokyo. Believe me, when you’re in a foreign country and you don’t know what time it is. It’s hard to sleep. Now, for the first time in several months, I will now reveal what I know called my own “Lost in Translation” experience except the only difference is I was in the Bahamas and elsewhere where I could understand the language but nothing else was familiar.
If I had to count how many hours I slept throughout the 4-day trip from Miami to Nassau to a remote island nearby to Key West, Florida, and back to Miami. I would guess probably about 4-5 hours each day average and I found that to be very unhealthy. Not to mention, the two days in Miami prior to the trip where I would sleep a bit more than that but not in a very good state either since I forgot about another set of curtains behind that made me force to wake up to the sun at around 7 AM. I’ll say this though, that was one of the worst experiences in a vacation trip I ever had. I’ll explain more later on as we continue on further to “Lost in Translation”.
Bob Harris wasn’t the only person in the Hilton that wasn’t sleeping, a young woman named Charlotte had trouble sleeping herself due to jet lag and also pondering her own young life. Whereas Harris had lived through a lot and filled with emptiness, for Charlotte, her adult life has barely begun where she watches her husband John sleeping as he tells her to try and sleep as he snores on through. When morning began, both Bob and Charlotte looked and felt like they hadn’t slept at all as Charlotte is forced to watch John leave for his photo assignment job while Bob is forced to go shoot his Suntori whiskey commercial.
By this point of the film, we know whom Bob Harris is as we then try to figure who Charlotte is. We see this young woman who had just graduated from Yale and is a newlywed with a husband, who obviously is too busy to pay attention to her. We’re wondering what is she doing in Tokyo when her husband’s away at work? Well, she couldn’t stay at home while he’s at another country so she had to tag along. Unfortunately for Charlotte, this begins the end of her naiveté as she begins to seek knowledge from the world of Tokyo and what she finds is the end of her youth.
Looking at a different world for Johansson isn’t anything new since she played a teenage Hungarian immigrant living in America in Eva Gardos’ autobiographical “An American Rhapsody”. In that acclaimed family drama, Johansson used her wandering eyes to view mid-1960s Hungary in the age of communism. Her Suzanne character in that film wanted to go back since she felt unhappy living in the U.S. with her biological parents but once she returns, whatever memory she had as a child in all of its innocence was lost through its politics and economy.
For Charlotte in modern Japan, she is looking through Tokyo from an outsider’s point of view. Unlike the teenage Suzanne in “An American Rhapsody”, Johansson was able to wander into a world that had never existed in her memory except in films or TV programs. Here it’s a huge wake up call as she wanders through subway and shops outside of Tokyo with an ominous musical background from the film’s music producer Brian Reitzell and Beck keyboardist Roger Joseph Manning Jr. In a deleted scene shown on the DVD, there’s a very touching scene of Charlotte looking at robots coming to her as if she was trying to connect but the robots ended up walking away from her. Then her journey continues through the Japanese temples where she saw monks chanting and in that one instant, her youth is gone forever.
Later on, Charlotte would look into the culture of Tokyo through its video games and walking in the Shibuya with an eerie, accompany score from Reitzell/Manning with additional musical textures from longtime Coppola sound designer Richard Beggs. Then there was another sequence where later on the film; she discovered the art of Japanese flowery called Ikebana with this musical background piece from Kevin Shields named “Ikebana”. For me, I found the scene to be very touching as Charlotte is trying to connect with these women through something so simple as flowers and with that melodic, ringing guitar riff that Shields played in that background of ambient synthesizers, it was a combination of Shields’ music, Sofia Coppola’s transcending direction, and Johansson’s minimalist acting style.
Sadly after that monk chanting scene, we see Charlotte for the first time breaking down emotionally as she calls a friend from her Hilton Hyatt hotel room to America where she tries to talk. For Charlotte, all that knowledge and all that work for her to get a degree becomes meaningless as for the first time in her life, she has no idea on who she is and what is she supposed to do. Her intellect has now made her insecure to even create and not even her husband John can do anything since he’s too caught up in his work. For Charlotte, she becomes what many people are becoming these days, particularly in the Bush administration. A group of aimless, wandering lost souls trying to figure out what to do and with everything that’s been given to them.
From my perspective, it rang very true since I had no idea on what I wanted to do when I was in high school. For that, it made me wished I had done better and maybe things would’ve been easier. Now, I know what I want to do but in these times, it might never happen. I really don’t want a mediocre job where I will end up losing it in my 40s and end up having this monotone life. I want knowledge and some kind of philosophy but I want to be very patient about it and not let things pass me by which is why I think I can relate to Charlotte very much. We both like to be intelligent (although I think she is far more intelligent than I am) and be creative but the difference is that she’s experienced love and these emotions where I’m still trying to find someone to love but my emotional, mental, and physical insecurities had me become more fearful than ever.
If Charlotte’s life has become difficult, it is pale in comparison to what Bob Harris has to go through. Here, he is selling out to the point where he’s trying to put a roof over his kids’ heads and him endorsing whiskey isn’t a good idea. Especially when he’s working with a crew of people that is speaking only Japanese to him. Now, there were some criticism that the American characters didn’t get the chance to use the language in the country they’re in. Well, maybe in some respect, yes they should’ve learned the language at some point but one of the reasons to go to a foreign country isn’t just to learn its language (even if you don’t understand it) but also to learn the culture of it.
This leads to one of the film’s funnier moments when a Japanese filmmaker asks in Japanese to bring in more intensity to Bob Harris’ performance but as the director talks to Harris’ translator, he is confused on what he was saying since he know he was saying a lot more. The great thing about the scene isn’t what the director is saying but the idea of what he is trying to say. In a movie where you see a foreigner in a different land, you’d expect to read subtitles. In this film, there were no subtitles. I think this is one of the great aspects that Sofia did was removing the subtitles and make the audience figure out what the director was saying. I actually understood probably, half the dialogue in that scene and it was funny seeing Murray’s reaction where he said, “Is that all he said? I think he was saying quite a bit more”. It’s that confusion and culture shock that really made the film both unintentionally funny yet confounding in its drama. Especially when Bob Harris recites his line, “For relaxing times, make it Suntory time” and the director yells, “Cut-o, cut-to, cut-o” in what I think is one of the film’s classic moments.
If Bob Harris’ commercial shoot was bad enough, even worse is when he has to come to the photo shoot the next day where he has to do all these forced imitations of the Rat Pack, Roger Moore as James Bond, and he begins to talk to his agent with his cell phone. The photographer in that session asked Bob about his movies and Bob said, “Yes, I should be doing movies” which indicates that his career has dwindled into mediocrity, especially in his age. I think when you’re older, depending on what career you had, your chances to have jobs will easily be harder to get, even if you’re a B-movie actor. For Harris, his life and career is now in a downward spiral that he can’t even describe.
If Harris’ life at work isn’t bad enough, his adjustment to the Japanese culture is more confusing. He is taller than many of the people in Japan and couldn’t fathom is mystique. Even in an earlier scene just before the photo shoot when one of his entourage sends an escort to his room. She demands for him to “rip her stockings” when to him, she’s saying, “lip my stocking”. He’s very confused at what she wants from him and once he touches her, she goes nuts and it’s one of the film’s funnier moments without trying to be funny. It’s one of those moments in life where everything is funny by accident where Coppola is using reality for entertainment like the way the French New Wave filmmakers did.
For Charlotte, her marriage is clearly more troubled than Bob Harris’. While Harris’ marriage seems to have slowed down to the point of limbo, Charlotte and John’s marriage is really crashing down. In the scene after Charlotte returns from the emotional breakdown at the monastery, we see the marriage unfolding between her and John. John seems to be distracted by his own work as a photographer while talking about how a band should be presented. She is working on a scarf that she sewed and she asked if its done and he said, “Uh…” and while he often says, “I love you” to her, he really doesn’t know what she’s feeling.
Making things worse just before his assignment is the encounter with an actress whom John was a friend of named Kelly. Kelly was promoting a movie in Japan where she began to say all of these idiotic things to John and told him, that he’s the only photographer she wants to work with. Charlotte meanwhile, is aghast at her dim-witted personality and then when she said she’s going under the name Evelyn Waugh, she thinks it’s a woman but Charlotte says that’s a man. John in turn starts to nag on her for being a smart aleck and saying not everyone went to Yale, which is a mean blow to her personality and intelligence.
Later when Charlotte walks around the Hyatt Hilton Hotel while John is away at work, she watches the press conference of Kelly promoting her movie where she talked about her co-star Keanu Reeves and all of these things. In the extended scene on the DVD, the scene showed some off-the-wall comedy through Anna Faris’ theatrical performance. Faris makes Kelly into a likeable character, even if she’s dumb, but there’s a smart satire in the way Faris approached the role. Now it was rumored that the character was based on actress Cameron Diaz, who starred in several comedies including Spike Jonze’s 1999 debut feature “Being John Malkovich”.
Well, it could be based on Diaz but I think what Coppola and Faris did was not just base it on Diaz but a lot of actress who are consumed by their own wonderfulness. It wasn’t an insult towards Diaz but really just a smart satire on the character. While Kelly is a character we can laugh at without really laughing at her, from the viewpoint of Charlotte, it makes her question her own personality and John’s comment about her being snotty.
When I was about to see the film the second time around, one of my pals at the Disc-Go Round used record store asked me if John is a precursor at who Bob Harris is? Well, it was a very good question. I don’t know; it’s something I think we’ll have to get to later while I’m trying to analyze this film. By now, we haven’t even gotten to the first conversation between Bob and Charlotte. By that point of the film, Charlotte sees Bob Harris in a tux after the photo shoot where he’s wearing mascara and she asks a waiter to buy a drink for him. In the background, we see John talking to all of these people around him about photos and she’s having a hard time trying to pay attention to him. Harris accepts the drink and gives Charlotte a thankful gesture while bringing another unintentional funny moment with all of these clippers in the back of his tuxedo jacket.
Of course, this comes to the question of the marriage between Sofia Coppola and Spike Jonze. Now later in the film, Charlotte says she’s mean and this begins to wonder if Sofia has a bit of self-loathing towards herself. I don’t know a lot about marriage but obviously a spouse comes to the point of being self-possessive. Maybe the failure of the Jonze/Coppola marriage was in part of the fact that both were artists trying to define themselves. In the DVD special feature of the location shooting, we see the two having fun and Spike shooting a lot of the stuff as the film is being made. I think what happened is, like many marriages relating to the entertainment industry, it suffers due to one’s success or both. Spike was becoming successful and then Sofia and now Sofia is becoming a huge auteur director by choosing to do something personal and making Spike feel bad in which, came the inevitable.
The marriage of John and Charlotte seems to be uneasy with the two drifting apart. With John often working, Charlotte ends up watching TV at night whenever he’s asleep and finally, she just walks out of the room. This moment would lead to Charlotte and Bob Harris’ first conversation. They’re both drawn together for one big reason; they both couldn’t sleep as she asks him what he’s doing here. Immediately, the conversation begins where he asks what she’s doing her and what she does, she says, “Uh, I’m not sure”. They talk a bit about marriage, she’s been married for two years with John and Bob’s been married for 25 years, but he knocks off eight since for some time, he just sleeps which shows Murray’s dry, straightforward humor.
After that conversation, both Bob and Charlotte did find a good thing in Tokyo, each other. With John in another world, Charlotte uses the time to explore Tokyo in which, she explores the arcades while Bob is introduced to water aerobics where in a deleted scene, and Murray joins in for the fun. Then when John returns from work, he decides to use whatever time left to be with Charlotte in which she’s happy at first but is unhappy when it would involve Kelly and a friend. Charlotte is forced to listen to Kelly’s talks about body weight and everything including a talk about how her father got anorexic during the Bay of Pigs. Charlotte tries to be sympathetic but couldn’t due to Kelly’s freewheel personality. In that bar, the only person Charlotte sees is Bob Harris, who is trying to get attention by trying to fall on the bar stool.
She comes to his place and asks how long will he be in Tokyo and he said, “I’m going to be in the bar for the rest of the week”. Realizing they’re both alone, Bob felt it’s time to leave Tokyo and just have some fun for themselves, away from their world and their spouses. Not commit into any infidelity or anything but just get away from the world in which, Bob asks “Are you in or are you out?” and she replies, “I’m in”. Now the two join forces into finding about Tokyo and everything else.
End of Part 3.
© thevoid99/Ikebana/Okrad/Charlotte Holloway Publishings, 2004.
Related Reviews:
Secretary Essay:
Part 1:
http://www.epinions.com/content_3458572420
Part 2:
http://www.epinions.com/content_3458965636
LIT Essay:
Part 1:
http://www.epinions.com/content_4022968452
Part 2:
http://www.epinions.com/content_4023951492
Part 4:
http://www.epinions.com/content_4028735620
Part 5:
http://www.epinions.com/content_4030439556
The Virgin Suicides (2000):
http://www.epinions.com/content_113280716420
Lost in Translation (2003):
http://www.epinions.com/content_113414475396
Lost in Translation Soundtrack (2003):
http://www.epinions.com/content_113940795012
City Girl Essay:
http://www.epinions.com/content_3871711364
 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Epinions.com ID:
thevoid99
|
 - Top 100 |
|
Member: Steven Flores
Location: Smyrna, Georgia
Reviews written: 1527
Trusted by: 439 members
|
|
|
© 1999-2009 Shopping.com, Inc.