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May 17, 2007
I watched a DVD of Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation the other night, after struggling through Bastard Boys on ABC television. I haven't seen Coppola's previous Virgin Suicides.
It is an intimate modest movie, albeit an interesting one as it explores dislocation, loneliness and emotional estrangement of nomadic westerners (Americans) whilst on business in the postmodern urban world of Tokyo.that stands for the global market place.
The loneliness of staying in international hotels whilst on business is accentuated with the channel clicking in the room, feeling disconnected in the bar and fighting the sense of being undead and being strange to ourselves.
A lot of the film is shot in the Park Hyatt hotel, which becomes a strange space high above the streets with its seductive views of Tokyo urbanscape. If romantic melancholy is everywhere, then the sublime is backgrounded in the dazzling neon world of the spectacle. Tokyo is an example of Guy Debord's society of the spectacle--"the spectacle is not a collection of images, but a social relation among people, mediated by images". We've lost our way in the society of the spectacle where mass marketing reduces actors to spokesmen and music becomes karaoke. Is it trash that the postmodern culture industry creates?
Coppola's film explores the disconnection from both Japan that Bob, a middle-aged actor shooting whisky commercials in Tokyo, and Charlotte, a Yale graduate accompanying her fashion photographer husband, are visiting, and from their spouses. They find some comfort in one another through a series of restrained, tentative encounters.
For all its ambiguity, the film is more about friendship, or rather companionship, than romance--in spite of the money shot in the opening sequence. The relationship is fleeting--an 'of the moment flirtation' that unfolds, but, as they're just friends, the touches are erotic but non-sexual. This is no love story in the conventional sense.
Kiku Day in an op-ed in The Guardian is critical of the not so subtle negative stereotyping of the Japanese by Sofia Coppola:
While shoe-horning every possible caricature of modern Japan into her movie, Coppola is respectful of ancient Japan. It is depicted approvingly, though ancient traditions have very little to do with the contemporary Japanese. The good Japan, according to this director, is Buddhist monks chanting, ancient temples, flower arrangement; meanwhile she portrays the contemporary Japanese as ridiculous people who have lost contact with their own culture.
The gaps in meaning between dialogue and its translation, which give rise to misunderstandings, also result in silences and stillness. Yet it is also about vision; but I cannot put my finger on it apart from the soft, low contrast look and the focus on appearances. We are lost in urban and interpersonal spaces that often intersect in a superficial sense. Beneath that enclosed space is the unfolding of a connection within an emotional world in a postmodern space.
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