April 12, 2006
Lost In Translation
Boredoms
Lost in Translation finds Bill Murray and Scarlet Johansson playing a man and a woman, respectively, both of whom wander around an expensive Tokyo high-rise hotel with nothing to do. They have nothing to do, the film insists, because they are too smart for it all. Anyone not Japanese in the film is depicted as terribly superficial; Johansson's husband is a fashion photographer, Murray's spouse sends him carpet samples. The Japanese, for their part, are hardly depicted at all, except to underscore the protagonists' alienation.
What they are smart about is the mystery. Too bored with their hotel rooms but too smart for all the suffocating superficiality, Murray and Johansson run around a neonlit, arcade-laden Tokyo still doing next to nothing. Maybe they're smart for each other? They kiss at the end, though that doesn't seem to change much of anything.
The problem is, Lost in Translation isn't all that smart. It seeks to capture the alienation of the upper classes, insisting that the air way up there is terribly thin in terms of meaning. Unfortunately, the film is just as thin, about as meaningful as your average episode of Laguna Beach, an MTV reality television with cinema-like production values that documented the love lives of immensely well-to-do teenagers in California. I struggle to see what difference it makes that the vacuity of Lost in Translation is intentional; the result is just about the same.
Maybe the film's problem was that it's director, Sofia Coppola, is the well-to-do daughter of Francis Ford Coppola (known for such films as the Godfather triology, Apocalypse Now and Jack). She's probably had access to cinematic tropes all her life (I hear she name-dropped Antonioni in her Best Screenplay Oscar speech), but Lost in Translation makes me think she's lost as to how to tie all these tropes together into something meaningful.
Comments
David said...
How can you judge a film based on the characters' lives and the director's background? You clearly don't understand what constitutes a well-made film. Please stop writing reviews and please stop pretending to be a "film critic".
Posted by: David | July 13, 2006 8:26 PM
Jeremy said...
I honestly can't find a "criticism" of the film in this review. I'm not trying to be as curt as David, but I'd love to sit out and discuss these "problems" with you.
Posted by: Jeremy | July 26, 2007 10:29 PM
Andrew said...
You probably won't be surprised to know my review began as a livejournal post, and made its way to Lucid Screening a year or two later when the site was still in its infancy, hungry for content.
My four breezy paragraphs are overly glib and too pithy to be serious film criticism, but I never claimed to be a serious film critic (though Lucid Screening gives me a professional-looking smokescreen... Lucid Smokescreening?). If I cared enough, this is the review of Lost in Translation I would like to have written: http://www.filmquarterly.org/pdfs/article5901.pdf It is by Homay King and appeared in the journal Film Quarterly.
King's four pages improve immeasurably on my four paragraphs, but its arguments don't differ very much from my own, though it backs them all up with footnotes and the essential international, political, and film contexts (what you point out my review was obviously lacking). It's abstract reads: "LiT was big in the States, but less so in Japan, where its racism deterred critics. While clearly trafficking in stereotypes, the film does depart from Hollywood's traditions of Orientalism by indicating that its Tokyo is actually a fantasy version projected by Americans abroad. Still, the film lacks the complexity of its European predecessors." I think its a great article.
King doesn't address the class issue, which I think is inescapable in at least the last two of Coppola's films. You're right that my denunciation of upper class vacuity is equally applicable to Fellini, Antonioni, and Resnais. Whatever the strengths of their films (and Resnais is one of my favorite filmmakers, at least until Stavinsky - I haven't seen anything after that), I believe this criticism applies to them as well. For me, that privilege is boring is itself a boring point to make; maybe you find it fascinating. Obviously somebody does or they wouldnt keep making films about it.
Or maybe it has to do with rich people being the ones who generally make films. No matter how hard I try to ignore it, the influence of Coppola's background on her films is very hard to dismiss, particularly when she herself acknowledges that LiT was in part autobiographical. The shit she often gets for being rich is often mixed-up with problematic jabs at her gender, and that is completely unfair (do you imply I am doing this by mentioning gender at the end of your blog post? It is unclear to me); many similar male film-makers from similar backgrounds (Wes Anderson comes to mind) never have to deal with that. But neither does the issue of gender erase the question of class, and how her last two films have strictly limited themselves, almost hermetically, within a privileged bubble.
Posted by: Andrew | August 1, 2007 4:06 AM