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LOST
IN TRANSLATION
5/10
USA 2003
: Sofia COPPOLA : 105 mins
Or should that
be Rost in Tlansration? After all, this is how the film’s title
would be pronounced by most of the people we see and hear on screen -
the comedy-Japanese who so amuse and bemuse the main characters (in fact,
the only proper ‘characters’) Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett
Johansson), a pair of mismatched Americans drifting together in Tokyo.
Several gags rely on the supposedly hilarious (‘hiralious’?) inability
of Japanese people to pronounce English words properly – at a photo-shoot
for a whisky advert, over-the-hill actor Bob is asked to pose like one
of the ‘Latpack,’ while later, reluctantly entertaining a prostitute,
he’s asked to “lip my stocking.” Bob and Charlotte even muse out loud
towards the end on this quaint linguistic point.
The whole film
operates on the patronising ‘aren’t foreigners funny’ level familiar from
BBC comedy-show Adam and Joe Go Tokyo - the audience never gets
much closer to the local culture than Charlotte, who we first see riding
in a taxi through downtown, dreamily observing the neon jungle through
her protective window-glass shield. There are some scenes where
Charlotte and Bob interact with Tokyo residents, but these efforts are
stymied by the fact that the pair speak about four words of Japanese between
them – and the film doesn’t bother translate the copious amounts of Japanese
with which they are bombarded. At least Quentin Tarantino’s Kill
Bill Vol. 1 let the audience in on what was being said.
The presentation
of the Japanese seems immature rather than actively, maliciously racist
or xenophobic. Writer-director Coppola apparently just doesn’t know any
better: on the evidence of this film and her so-so debut The
Virgin Suicides, it’s very tempting to note the words she places
in Charlotte’s mouth, when she dismisses a certain section of her life
as ‘girl-goes-through-a-photography-phase.’ Lost In Translation shows
that Coppola is still enduring her ‘girl-goes-through-moviemaking-phase’:
a hostage-to-fortune line if ever there was one. Leaving aside the script’s
inadequacies (that howlingly cliché of a title should have been a warning-sign),
the film is blandly directed at best, despite the best efforts of crack
cinematographer Lance Acord.
Or perhaps
it was Acord who decided to ‘improve’ a striking shot of Murray golfing
in front of Mount Fuji by inserting a clumsy filter? On the evidence of
Acord’s work for Coppola’s husband Spike Jonze on Being
John Malkovich and Adaptation,
however, this seems unlikely. And what must Jonze make of Lost In Translation,
in which Charlotte – a directorial surrogate if ever there was one – is
stuck in an unsatisfactory marriage to scrawny, geeky-trendy photographer
John (Giovanni Ribisi)? Who may or may not still carry a torch for his
airheaded ex, American actress Kelly (amusing Anna Faris) both of them
pure caricatures.
Then again,
Lost In Translation really only has one subject, the relationship
between Bob and Charlotte. This is a conspicuously chaste April-November
set-up that’s much more a father-daughter scenario than anything romantic
- Bob tellingly expresses guilt about having forgotten his child’s birthday.
Despite this, in order to inject some final-act drama Coppola has Charlotte
suffer an implausible fit of jealousy when she finds Bob in bed with their
hotel-lounge’s resident jazz-chanteuse (Catherine Lambert, stuck in a
truly thankless role).
With all these
flaws and reservations, it’s perhaps surprising that Lost In Translation
is never less than watchable – thanks almost entirely to the efforts
of the cast: Johansson, who does her best to make a potentially annoying
character sympathetic and, best of all, Murray, who gets too few lead
roles of this kind for audiences to be especially choosy when they do
come along. Bemused and melancholic, he mines every laugh possible out
of the script – and probably quite a few that weren’t written down at
all – in what amounts to a textbook verbal and physical comic performance.
Oddly, however, the single sequence seized upon by most critics as Murray’s
highlight – a karaoke rendering of Roxy Music’s “More Than This” – falls
disappointingly flat. But it’s an appropriate selection: Murray, like
Johansson, and the audience, really do deserve much more than this.
11th
November, 2003 (seen 29th October : Odeon West End, London
– London Film Festival)
click
here for a full list of films covered at the 2003 London Film Festival
Click
here to read an updated review after a second viewing.
by Neil
Young
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