"Sleepless
in Tokyo" would have been the obvious title for Lost
in Translation, but there is more to the
film than being bored in the antiseptic Park Hyatt Hotel
with a sweeping
view of Japan's capital city. The plot develops at two
levels that continually intersect. One is about the intensity
of Japanese culture, the other about two sensitive Americans
who stay at the same hotel and find solace together. Fiftysomething
actor Bob Harris (played by Bill Murray) arrives from Los
Angeles jetlagged one evening and is greeted by a polite
entourage, who in turn give him gifts and the key to his
hotel room.
Although exhausted from the trip, he does not catch up
on his sleep during the entire week, due in part to stupid
telephone calls from his wife at 4 a.m. He is to
make $2 million for endorsing Suntory whiskey, and he later
appears live on a talk show hosted by a foppish Japanese
interviewer. Twentysomething Charlotte (played by Scarlett
Johansson), who has just graduated with a B.A. in philosophy
from Yale, is accompanying her husband John (played by
Giovanni Ribisi). John, also from Los Angeles, has been
hired to do camera shoots, leaving her alone and bored.
Eventually the two meet in the cocktail lounge of the hotel,
converse, go on excursions around town together, but maintain
a platonic relationship. Charlotte realizes that Harris
is undergoing a midlife crisis, so she provides a little
diversion. Indeed, his wife has so taken over domestic
affairs that he feels estranged from the independent life
that he once enjoyed. Meanwhile, Harris perceives that
Charlotte, who has only been married two years, needs some
paternal advice on how to survive in a long-term relationship.
Their experience together, thus, is not only mutually therapeutic
but throws out good advice to filmviewers in both age cohorts,
especially those trapped in marriages that leave them feeling
as if they were potted plants. Japan's culture provides
the needed comic relief; although the protagonists make
facial antics rather than comments about Japan, filmviewers
will quickly figure out what is amusing--from a hotel drapery
that opens in the morning as an alarm device to expressionless
automatons at pachinko parlors to drunk patrons at a tasteless
strip nightclub. Sofia Coppola, the director, obviously
found Japan's idiosyncrasies to be quite comical, but she
also takes serious aim at three Hollywood airheads--Charlotte's
workaholic husband, Harris's home decorating wife, and
narcissistic Kelly (played by Anna Faris), a starlet who
is also appearing in a Tokyo production of some sort. When
Lost in Translation appears in
France film, the absurdist theme will produce much laughter
from filmviewers. In the
United States, the laughter is directed at how the regimentation
that afflicts Japanese culture is uncorked in unusual ways.
MH
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