Lost in Translation

Lost in Translation (2003)

 
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4.2 (2)
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Trish Smith
Updated October 12, 2024
Lost in Translation

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Movie Overview | Lost in Translation (2003)

Middle-aged American movie star Bob Harris is in Tokyo to film a personal endorsement Suntory whiskey ad solely for the Japanese market. He is past his movie star prime, but his name and image still have enough cachet for him to have gotten this lucrative $2 million job. He has an unsatisfying home life where his wife Lydia follows him wherever he goes - in the form of messages and faxes - for him to deal with the minutiae of their everyday lives, while she stays at home to look after their kids. Staying at the same upscale hotel is fellow American, twenty-something recent Yale Philosophy graduate Charlotte, her husband John, an entertainment still photographer, who is on assignment in Japan. As such, she is largely left to her own devices in the city, especially when his job takes him out of Tokyo. Both Bob and Charlotte are feeling lost by their current situations, which are not helped by the cultural barriers they feel in Tokyo, those cultural barriers extending far beyond just not knowing the language. After a few chance encounters in the hotel, they end up spending much of their time hanging out together, each helping the other deal with their feelings of loss in their current lives. The friendship that develops between the two, which is not always a bump-free one, may be just for this specific place and time, but it may also have long lasting implications.

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User reviews

2 reviews
Overall rating
 
4.2
Entertainment Factor
 
4.0(2)
Story
 
4.5(2)
Actors Performance
 
4.5(2)
Cinematography
 
4.0(2)
Sound Track
 
4.0(2)
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A lovely, poignant movie
(Updated: January 04, 2025)
Overall rating
 
4.4
Entertainment Factor
 
4.0
Story
 
5.0
Actors Performance
 
5.0
Cinematography
 
4.0
Sound Track
 
4.0
I love this movie. Not necessarily for the story line, but for how beautifully it portrays the sense of isolation, loneliness and confusion when one is a visitor in a culture and environment so different from one’s own.. It is mostly a quiet movie, beautifully played by Scarlet Johanson and Bill Murray. There is something so touching about their relationship and how it evolves. The movie progresses slowly, but creates a wonderful atmosphere and a window into some fascinating aspects of Japanese culture, as well as a window into the very different lives of two unhappy  people whose paths cross at a vulnerable point in each of their lives.
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Very Romantic
(Updated: January 04, 2025)
Overall rating
 
4.0
Entertainment Factor
 
4.0
Story
 
4.0
Actors Performance
 
4.0
Cinematography
 
4.0
Sound Track
 
4.0
 Sophia Coppola’s second movie as a director is more than a breakthrough: it’s an insouciant triumph. She conjures a terrifically funny, heartbreakingly sad and swooningly romantic movie from almost nowhere and just makes it look very easy - as well as very modern and very sexy. 

Bill Murray is Coppola’s leading man, in a part she says she wrote with him in mind. Now, Murray can be high-risk casting; everyone knows how good he is, but when he decides to switch off and just coast, no one looks more contemptuously uninterested. (Remember him in Osmosis Jones?) Here, though, Murray’s Mitchum-ish not-caring aura is channelled and shaped in just the right way, and he gives one of the best performances of his career.

Murray plays Bob, a has-been movie star staying at a vast Tokyo hotel - a virtual mini-city-state with its own complex of bars, restaurants and gym facilities - where he is filming a Japanese whisky commercial: that lucrative gig notoriously accepted by the grandest of real-life Hollywood stars on the understanding that the ad will never be shown in the US. Bob candidly despises himself for doing this, and is all too aware that a big reason for it, apart from the money, is to get away from a marriage that is starting to go sour.

Meanwhile, in another part of the hotel, Charlotte, played by Scarlett Johanson, is a thoughtful young woman matching Murray’s menopausal ennui with a quarterlife crisis of her own. She has been married for just two years to John, a hotshot photographer, played by Giovanni Ribissi. John is on an assignment taking pictures of a fashionable indie band and Charlotte has agreed to come along for the ride and amuse herself as best she may while John is out working.

But alienated and unsettled by Tokyo’s clamorous high-rise strangeness, Charlotte experiences a flash of panic about her own life. What is she doing here? Does she even know that much about her husband? Her quiet dismay is deepened when John is obviously wildly excited at hanging out with an appalling Hollywood airhead with an unearthly similarity to Britney Spears. Charlotte, the Yale graduate in her unflattering woollen tank-top is made to feel dowdy and dull by this jabbering Valley girl.

So Bob and Charlotte are pretty well made for each other. During strained conversation with John’s dullard buddies in the bar, Charlotte makes eye contact with Bob who is drinking himself into oblivion there every night, assiduously preserving the integrity of his disdain by pickling it in booze.

Bob’s droll smirk of complicity is irresistible, and soon they are hanging out, having fun, sharing a big private joke in the wackiness of Japan and not admitting to themselves or each other their growing tenderness.

The warmth and gentleness that Coppola gets from Murray and Johansson is a miracle of intelligent, hands-off direction. As a writer, she gives us a hilarious scene in which Murray, togged up in tuxedo and bizarre Mikado-level make-up, has to leer at the camera and mouth the ad slogan, before enduring a Japanese director’s screaming rage (“Cut-a! Cut-a! Cut-a!”) which is rendered into tactful English by the interpreter.

Bob and Charlotte’s big adventure reaches a lovely scene when they confess their most personal fears to each other, while lying on a bed, their hands not touching, their lips not meeting. It’s hardly without sexual tension, but the intimacy goes beyond regular-issue desire, and when Bob tells her how he felt when his children were born, their relationship for a moment slips through the net of classification. Are they lovers? Friends? Mentor and pupil in the mysteries of life? Father and daughter?

It’s impossible to say. “Let’s not ever come back here,” says Charlotte to him. “Because it’ll never be as much fun again.” There’s no point in Bob asking for her number, or for Charlotte asking for his because this connection can never, should never be prolonged or revived beyond this gently ecstatic moment. And this fact gives a special poignancy to Murray’s weatherbeaten, sensitive face on the cusp of turning into that of an old man.

The chemistry between Murray and Johansson produced a one-off special something.  I recommend seeing this film.

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