Lost in Translation is a 2003 American film written and directed by Sofia Coppola. It stars Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. This film was a major
critical success and it was nominated for four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Actor for Bill Murray, and Best Director for Sofia Coppola; Coppola won for Best Original Screenplay. Scarlett Johansson won a BAFTA award for Best Actress in a Leading Role. The film was also a commercial success, grossing almost
$120 million from a budget of only $4 million.
Lost in Translation follows the developing of the
relationship between Bob Harris (Bill Murray), a Hollywood actor who has come
to Tokyo to film whiskey ads, and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), the wife of a photographer who has also
travelled to Tokyo. They meet up by chance in a hotel of Tokyo and both of them
share a boring and unsatisfying marriage. They experience attraction and love for
each other but they don’t know what they really want.
The
film deals with the themes of loneliness, alienation, insomnia, existential ennui, and culture shock against
the backdrop of a modern Japanese city. But the main theme is
loneliness:
Loneliness
because despite the characters are surrounded by millions of people, both of
them feel more alone than anywhere in the world; where the television has a clearly
narrative function, and it only serves to accentuate the feeling of loneliness. Although in theory it
is one of the few things that can attach them to what they left in their
country.
This film has not a real plot structure, with a beginning,
middle, and end. Moreover, it is full of silences; but there are silences that say
a lot, sometimes more than one may think.
From my point of view, the film is sad and funny at
the same time. It is a sample where everything has a place: the humour, the
drama, tenderness, irony, the search for oneself, bewilderment, the personal
failure.
I think that the film describes a beautiful love story, one of the
most subtle and beautiful stories that I have seen in a while on a movie screen.
It has three key moments:
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The first one when both of them share the bed, lying face up, dressed,
without touching, explaining his fears, his hand seeking her fingers until they
happy felt asleep. The other one is when Bob loads in his arms Charlotte after
a party night; he comes into the room, he puts her to bed, he removes her
shoes, he pulls the covers up, he rubs her arm, he
switches off the light and he closes the door for anyone disturb her happy sleep
in that magical night that just passed. In that moment we can notice the man
feels desire for the girl, but he also knows that it cannot be.
Precisely
because the film tells the story of something that cannot be that we can see in
the third key moment, at the end of the film, when he walks over to her and
whispers something to her, something that is intelligible. Something that can
mean many things.
