So I’m gonna talk about the movie “Lost in Translation” today, and it’s going to have some spoilers, but this isn’t so much a review as a reaction, so there’s my, like, disclaimer and stuff.
“Translation” is one of those “Oh yea, I’ll get around to seeing that sooner or later” and then one day you realize it’s out of the movie houses, so you make a vow to see it in a second-run theatre, but then life gets in the way and before you know it, you’re in “6 months ‘til it’s on video”, but once it’s out on video, you think, “Eh, I’ve waited this long, I’ll wait for it to be on HBO”, and once it’s on HBO, you always come in 20 minutes into it, see the same eight minutes, then change the channel.
It’s like “Ernest Goes to Camp”, that way.
Sufficed to say, I’m amazed that I finally got around to seeing it, and thanks to Obi Wan, had the impetus to head out to Davis Square and see the film. For those of you who can’t quite place this film yet, it’s the “Bill Murray in Tokyo” flick, which is the way they sell it on the commercial, which is to say that it’s only 1/42nd of what’s really going on in the movie. The whole movie turns on the title, consistently shifting our perspective as an audience in terms of what is really lost and across what boundaries.
At first, the boundary is Tokyo itself, in that with very economical means we are thrust into the world of Bob Harris (Murray), who is in Tokyo to film a whiskey promotion. Harris speaks not a word of Japanese, and the movie doesn’t give us any subtitles, since we are meant to feel the same sense of dislocation and disarray that Harris does. It’s a city which feels familiar yet completely alien.
Meanwhile, Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johansson, is a young 20-something in the same hotel as Bob, tagging along because, in her own words, she wasn’t really doing anything anyways. Bob and Charlotte instinctively bond, but the movie takes its time with this bonding, instead of the typical “tell me your life story in the first five minutes we meet” scene in a lesser film.
And as they bond, the movie shifts from the external motif of miscommunications (the English/Japanese barrier) to a much more internal one---namely, the miscommunication that occurs between two people who no longer feel they understand their spouses, or can be understood by them in turn. Bob and Charlotte are both unhappy participants in marriages they might have once understood, but seem to them as alien as the landscape of the city in which they meet. The brief, fleeting conversations we see between themselves and their spouses are full of dialogue that, if given a simple readback in a courtroom, would seem mundane at worst, yet are filled with tired, clichéd, unidirectional sound bytes.
This unidirectionality is the focus of the middle part of the movie. Things are said, but never communicated. Messages are sent, but never truly received. Whether it’s Charlotte’s inability to engage with a table of wanna-be Hollywood stars, or Bob’s frustration over carpet samples sent via Fed-Ex from his wife, these characters feel cut off not only from the city but their own lives as well. They are near what was once their lives, but have somehow become desensitized to it. Communication, in all forms, has broken down for them.
There’s a telling moment where Charlotte removes a few Polaroids from a folder in her hotel room. These Polaroids were ostensibly taken by her husband, himself a photographer for rock stars. In these photographs, he’s looking at the camera, while she’s looking at him. The focus of the gaze is telling in ways that are intuitively understood by Charlotte and, in addition, we are audience. He’s a man who’s in love with the way he is seen by everyone and everything except the one person whose gaze he should care most about. He says, “I love you,” every time he leaves her, but out of a sense of “This is what I should say at this point of leaving” rather than as an immediate expression of affection.
Bob’s wife, for her part, consistently brings up carpet samples as a way to simply not talk about how much these two people do not talk. They speak, yes, but they don’t talk, and the movie makes a point of showing the difference between the two. Speaking involves the uttering of sound, but talking is the actual response to these sounds that make sense to the two parties involved. The two married couples have long ceased talking. But Bob and Charlotte, through each other, learn the long-lost art of conversation.
What’s left, then, in this movie is the re-establishment of dialogue between two people who thought their time for such conversation was over. Whereas their spouses communicate to them through faxes (yet another unidirectional form of communication), Bob and Charlotte communicate through the lighting of a cigarette, a head on a shoulder, the singing of a karaoke song. And what you see as an audience member are two people who rediscover the self-worth that had been at some previous points stripped from themselves. To watch Bob’s forced smile during a photo shoot and then watch his smile towards her is to see a man awakening from a virtual coma of emotion. To see her rest her shoulder on his head is to see a woman who is confessing her loneliness and her desire to break free. They’ve each found someone who speaks and understands their language.
Which leads us to the final transformation of the title of the movie. All of which seems to be leading to a May/December romance. And, in a way, the movie does lead to this conclusion, but not in the way you expect, but exactly in the way it should. Bob is leaving the hotel in a limo, after an awkward final encounter with Charlotte. But, as chance would have it, he sees her walking down the street, alone, a few minutes later in the car. He gets out of the car, walks to her, and spins her around. You brace for the kiss, but instead, he hugs her. And with both faces pressed against each other, he says something to her. What? You don’t know.
And that’s absolutely brilliant.
Possibly the best movie moment I’ve experienced in years. You hear that he is talking, but the way that the sound is mixed leaves his message muddled, leaving only her to hear what he has to say. Which is precisely the way it should be.
What’s ultimately lost in translation here is our ability as an audience to understand the communication between these two people. But it’s not ours to understand, because we don’t have ownership over that communication. It’s a singular form that belongs to two people and two people alone. What’s important for us as an audience is to see that Charlotte understands what he says completely, and at that moment, and that moment alone, can they finally kiss.
Why this moment struck me so powerfully is the fact that this is something I’ve been coming to terms with over the past few months myself. We spend so much time looking at couples, be they celebrities or coworkers or people in the shoe department at Macy’s, and wonder, “How do THEY work?” Or we see friends dating someone that we think is “below” them or “not the right fit” even though your friend seems really happy. Or we wonder why people invest so much time and concern and energy into trying to figure out why we are spending time with a person they think is hopeless.
In the end, it’s the singularity of communication, embodied in Bob and Charlotte, that dictates every relationship, for good or for bad. No person, no matter how well-intended, can ever possibly understand what that communication entails. Nor can you ever give language lessons to clue that person into the unique dialogue that is you as a pair. Heck, most of the time you can’t even put a lingual finger on it yourself. Doesn’t matter. Overanalyzing the communication, the chemistry, the bond…just death. What’s important is not to define it per say, but simply to recognize it. Explore it. Revel in it. But don’t try to define it.
Then again, the only thing worse to do than define it is the ignore it. There’s nothing more important in this life that to strive for the type of relationship that is incomprehensible to the rest of the world. I mean that sincerely. Finding that person with whom there’s a mutual understanding no one else can replicate…well, I can imagine a person could feel quite lost without that type of person in his or her life.