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:::Movie Review:::
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Film: Lost in Translation
By Michael Moore
February 2005
Michael A. Moore, aka Quess?, is a poet/writer/spoken word artist and recent graduate of FAMU.
He hails from New Orleans, LA by way of Brooklyn, NY and is former editor of the Creative Mindz
section of the FAMUAN Newspaper. He may be seen performing at Mt. Zion Calypso Cafe and can be
reached at bklynmik@yahoo.com
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I am staring into the opaque white froth of liquid plasma that ensconces my vision as
I contemplate words to put to paper—ahem, computer screen, that would accurately
transcribe the cinematic experience that is Sophia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.
Oddly enough, as the cathode rays of this high grade teleport of digital consciousness
warp my senses to a lifeless pulp, I find myself feeling (or not feeling) strangely
parallel to the character that Bill Murray portrays that leads us through this subtle,
nuance-laced reverie of a film. In my head, a soundtrack is playing. There are words,
melodies, and quotes of soothsaying sages of yesteryear afloat. Some of my brethren
from the Caucasoid end of the color spectrum are whispering a harmonious and sweet
incantation of a lullaby in my ears… "Hanging on in quiet desperation is the English
way." Pink Floyd’s cotton soft bouncy symphony from the Dark Side of the Moon ricochets
off the bass of my eardrums and then—funny thing, the cosmic principle satisfies itself,
as sound becomes light and springboards a pellucid vision splat into my third eye.
There, I see it. Bill Murray is sitting placidly and as comatose as a rheumatic,
enwrapped in a Kimoto in a distant land, looking lost as all get out—the perfect metaphor.
Then, the mental visage becomes a poster stapled to the wall of my mind as if waiting for
the perfect caption to be inscribed across the bottom encasing its meaning (as if the song
lyric wasn’t enough). I see a quote from a frog-eyed American prophet exiled in France.
James Baldwin’s words: "The time our fathers bought for us resides in a place no man can
reach, except he be prepared to reduce himself to atoms, to smashed fragments of bleached
bone, which is indeed the great temptation, beckoning this disastrous nation." His
floating words plaster themselves to the bottom of the poster and voila—a picturesque
encasement of the movie’s underlying theme. Well hot damn! Sophia Coppola should have
hit me up for a prescreening. I could have designed the billboard.
Sophia’s second installment into the world of film (the critically acclaimed Virgin Suicides
was her first) registers somewhere near her debut but with a little bit less quieted soft
angst, and a healthy dose of aged wisdom splashed in for good measure. The first outing ended
with the melodramatic suicide of five lily-white sisters from the somnolent Midwest suburbs
of 1970’s America who have apparently had enough of the nihilistic stupor of their banal
existence. This second offering picks up not too far from the first one except the culprits
in question are now a middle-aged movie star stuck in the throes of a midlife crisis and a
young twenties newlywed experiencing a breakdown of her own. The two find themselves settling
like silt into the repository of a Japanese vacation that—let these two despondent outcasts
portray it—looks more like lonely exile. While plush with Western amenities and technological
titillation, the world that Japan offers the over the hill actor Bob Harris (Bill Murray)
and Charlotte, the upper echelon Yale graduate smart-ass (played by newcomer Scarlett Johansson)
does little to revitalize the jaded sensibilities of either. If anything, it further shellacs
them in the hedonistic excess of modernity (of which Japan has plenty to offer). It is from
these annals of muffled despair that the two main characters fumble haplessly into each other’s company.
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Johansson’s 25 year old girl, apparently disenchanted with the quasi-bohemian
circle of friends that her hipster photographer husband is hobnobbing with, allows
her eyes to drift in the direction of Bill Murray’s weathered actor one night while
in the hotel lounge. She, apparently like every other American vacationing in Japan,
recognizes Bob as that infamous star from Movie X and pays him homage of giggling
girlishly at his joking gestures from across the room. "Look at me, I’m a jaundiced
know it all outsider forever banished to the periphery of life’s conformist triteness
too", his antics seem to exclaim. Whatever he is dishing up, homegirl is obviously
biting because she promptly offers him a drink and from there, the cooing begins.
Don’t get it twisted though, Lost In Translation is no fast paced Hollywood romping romance
replete with the spry and bubbly Colgate fresh flirtation and multiple hot and steamy sex
scenes of the usual cut, copy and paste mainstream flick. That was not Sophia Coppola’s modus
operandi at all here. In the case of this movie, think nuance. Better yet, if names are indeed
programmatic as the Malidoma Some’s Dagara tribe have taught us, do the etymology and think
sophistication… Sophia… as in the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom. Yeah, think wisdom and subtlety.
The movie is ripe with them both, latent in its undertones. It seems to guide the film along as
though some oceanic undertow atop which the story buoys and floats along.
Sophia Coppola, daughter of the legendary Francis Ford Coppola maker of such classics as Apocalypse
Now and the Godfather trilogy, is no stranger to the avant-garde. She was virtually raised in it.
Apparently some of that influence rubs off on her cinematic approach. Further, it is nearly presumable
at this point that much of her life shows up in her storylines. Virgin Suicides is about 5 angst ridden
teenage white girls whose undercurrents of turmoil bubble up so madly that despite the veneer of their
placid appearance, they all decide to silently evict themselves from life. In Lost, the main character
is, once again, an alienated young white female, obviously too intelligent for her own good, whose
angst, while less detectable, is still noticeable—shit blaringly present throughout the whole movie!
Charlotte glides through the film as cool as a hapless heroine addict on ice skates, as though her
callous indifference is the last fig leaf that may clothe her inner turmoil with any sense of peace—a
calm in a sea of impendent depression. Beneath the malaise, however, is a girlish softness that seems
desperate to edge its way out. Perhaps that would explain why she chose the goofy,
garage-band-front-man-looking hipster (played by Giovanni Ribisi) for a husband. But when that nest
fails to satisfy all her desires, she slides into cohorts with the hapless Bob Harris.
It’s hard not to see Sophia Coppola’s essence somehow present in Charlotte and her "acquisition"
of Bill Murray (she reportedly would have no one else for the role) as mirroring her leading lady’s
wooing of a veteran esteemed movie star. One senses a bit of an autobiographical tinge in the undertones
of this film. Meanwhile, from the aesthetical quality that employs minimalism and innuendo to leave the
viewer with an evanescent feeling from the whole experience, to the chosen subject matter itself
(alienation and despair—common themes out here on the forlorn Western frontier), Lost serves as an apt
mirror for much of the collective human psyche right now—specifically the American state of mind. Sophia’s
aversion from prototypical film structure, having broken the thing down into a "collection of moments", as
she puts it, is part of a common trend in independent films of late. It somehow reflects the societal break
from conformist modalities of thought and behavior (and even religious practice) into a consequently
diffracted way of life that seems to be in search of itself. Having been forcibly disbanded from the old
ways, "the time our fathers bought for us", we have all been essentially disintegrated into those atoms
of which our prophetic ancestor spoke. Bob and Charlotte are two atoms who happen to find each other in a
distant land—and that’s where this movie makes itself a modern classic. Having spared us the requisite
(and often trifling and overdone) explicit sexual encounter, Coppola opts for something less transient
and more valuable with Bob and Charlotte’s affair; it ends with the desperate embrace of the disparate.
In this Lost in Translation speaks not only for a host of discombobulated drifters meshed in the vast
sea of modernism, but for the many more to come. Having lost touch with the frequencies of consciousness
of yester year and their accompanying idioms and lingo, Bill and Sophia—ahem, Bob and Charlotte are sure
not to be the only ones who find themselves lost in translation.
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