Lost in Translation
Sofia Coppola (2003)
Straining for up-to-the-minute cultural relevance, The Devil Wears Prada 2 seems to have succeeded in ways it didn’t intend. A ‘Controversies’ section on the film’s Wikipedia page describes – at length – a brouhaha about the minor character of Anne Hathaway’s PA Jin Chao (played by Chinese-American actress Helen J Shen) – specifically, ‘the alleged use of racist tropes’ in relation to Jin Chao’s name and personal characteristics. The whole thing reads like a parody of woke zealotry. Still, it was an instructive coincidence that, just two days after seeing Prada 2, I watched Lost in Translation for the first time in twenty years or more. Despite the overwhelmingly positive reactions to writer-director Sofia Coppola’s Tokyo-set romantic comedy-drama in 2003, it did attract accusations of racism, even then, for its portrayal of the Japanese. Lost in Translation simply couldn’t be made nowadays.
It hadn’t occurred to me beforehand that the Japanese jokes would be a problem. I don’t remember their being so on previous viewings, but times have changed and I must have changed with them (never mind that the Prada 2 controversy is still preposterous). On Lost in Translation‘s original release, Sofia Coppola began her response to criticisms of racial stereotyping with ‘I can see why people might think that, but I know I’m not racist …’ Even that defence – the racist’s near-default words of assurance – makes you cringe now. There’s no getting away from Coppola’s reliance on the long-dependable comedy of Asians mispronouncing the English ‘r’ sound as ‘l’. She does so repeatedly in the scene where the film’s protagonist, American actor Bob Harris (Bill Murray), in Tokyo to shoot a Suntory whisky commercial, is confronted in his hotel room by a Japanese prostitute, who urges him to ‘lip my stockings’. In the studio where the whisky ad’s being filmed, its director explains that he wants Bob to come across like a member of the Lat Pack, or as James Bond (Loger Moore, that is).
Although I smiled with discomfort this time around, I did still smile – Bill Murray gave me no option. Besides, there’s much more than racial humour at work here. Bob Harris is a Hollywood movie star on the way down. People know his face but don’t really remember his films (they just know they loved that one with the car chase). You get the strong impression that commercials are his most lucrative work these days. He’s also a husband and father in an unhappy marriage. Bob didn’t order the excitable, sub-femme-fatale sex worker (Nao Asuka) who knocks on his door (some kind of fixer at the hotel sent her). His incomprehension of what she’s instructing him to do reflects, on the simple linguistic level, the implication of Coppola’s title, but Bob’s weary bewilderment also expresses a frazzled state of mind that’s both temporary (he’s still jet lagged) and chronic. The racial jokes in Lost in Translation are very awkward now. In other respects, the film has aged well.
In the same hotel, Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) is staying with her husband John (Giovanni Ribisi), who photographs celebrities and is ‘shooting a band’ in Tokyo. A recent Yale graduate (in philosophy), Charlotte is less than half Bob’s age. Her marriage, compared with his, is also very young but it’s soon evident that she’s dissatisfied with herself – she did have vague writing ambitions but now has no idea what to do next – and with her self-absorbed husband. When Bob and his wife talk on the phone, her main concern is apparently carpet samples (‘you were right about the burgundy’). He and Charlotte have already exchanged looks, then conversation in the hotel bar, by the time John’s work takes him away from central Tokyo for a few days. While he’s away, Charlotte and Bob spend time together. They enjoy the city’s nightlife, including a karaoke place where both sing (she does The Pretenders’ ‘Brass in Pocket’, he does Roxy Music’s ‘More Than This’ and Elvis Costello’s ‘(What’s So Funny ‘Bout) Peace, Love and Understanding’). They visit a hospital to get treatment on the toe that she stubbed in her hotel room a few days ago. They grow close.
Only eighteen at the time (even younger than her character’s meant to be), Scarlett Johansson had appeared in plenty of films by the time she made Lost in Translation, most notably Terry Zwigoff’s Ghost World (2001). Within a few weeks of the opening of Coppola’s film, Johansson was also in cinemas as the title character in Peter Webber’s Girl with a Pearl Earring. She plays that role well but Webber’s film, as might be expected, gives her a chiefly pictorial purpose. In Lost in Translation, she’s emotionally fluid, and precociously good at suggesting quiet melancholy. But this is Bill Murray’s film and – with all due respect to his big hits like Ghostbusters (1984) and Groundhog Day (1993), not forgetting his brilliant contribution to Tootsie (1982) – his finest hour in cinema. Murray melds his trademark deadpan comedy with romantic yearning to truly memorable effect.
It’s easy to say that’s it easy for an actor to play an actor, but foolish to say, too. Bob is exasperated by the whisky commercial’s hyper director (Yutaka Tadokoro) and his relentlessly upbeat Japanese hosts generally, but he’s doing a job and Murray is professionally obliging to just the right degree. That means letting the audience see what these other people on screen don’t see. Bob’s fatigue with being a public figure is always anchored in sad and guilty feelings about his personal life. His few days with Charlotte both refresh Bob and, in doing so, intensify his unhappiness, while she finds in him the security of a father figure, as well as a funny man to whom she’s attracted. There’s a scene where they lie side by side on a bed, watching television, but that’s as close as they get physically – at least until their parting embrace. In the meantime, Bob sleeps with the singer (Catherine Lambert) from Sausalito, the hotel lounge trio. Charlotte is naturally upset when she finds this out the next morning, but the one-night stand, from Bob’s point of view, makes an odd kind of emotional sense. It happens mechanically, vindicates his self-reproach, and keeps the unconsummated relationship with Charlotte special.
Bob’s jaded, Charlotte’s adrift, but they both always know they have worrying marriages to return to. Lost in Translation is, then, a strong dual character study and a distinctive romance. The exotic setting allows it to expand into something larger, speaking to the emotional fundamentals of being in a strange place for a short time. The utter foreignness of the new locale, its sights and sounds, language and rhythms – how enchanting, invigorating and alienating this all can be. The peculiar loneliness of hotel rooms. The desperate strain of feeling obliged to enjoy tourist attractions: Charlotte feels nothing at a Buddhist temple she visits, whereas chancing upon a wedding ceremony absorbs her. Coppola and her cinematographer Lance Acord capture these themes imaginatively. Perhaps the standout image is Bob on a dazzling green golf course in the foreground, Mount Fuji mysterious in the background.
Sofia Coppola was in a privileged position. Like her directing debut, The Virgin Suicides (1999), this sophomore feature was financially supported by American Zoetrope, co-founded by her father in the 1970s (in 2007, Sofia and her brother Roman became the company’s co-owners). Even so, the picture was made outside the Hollywood studio system, with a small crew, on what sounds like – even a quarter-century ago – an almost indie budget of $4m. This is an artistically ambitious film that took well over $100m at the box office. Like the funny-foreigner jokes, that combination seems to date Lost in Translation; unlike the jokes, in a good way.
8 May 2026