Lost in non-translation
There exists a conspiracy, I'm sure, that serves to repeatedly disrupt my already sketchy relationship with the blogosphere. I haven't blogged for a week because I really didn't want to have to say that someone stole my PowerBook (the very one that took forever to fix) and that it makes me feel like I'd lost half my brain. But that they did, and did so by breaking into my apartment through my balcony window — and if you know where I live, you'll know how unlikely and improbable this is.
Anyway, life goes on and I wasn't feeling like writing anything until the discussion with Patrick last night about the much-celebrated "Lost in Translation", which he liked very much. My reaction, on the other hand, was probably more around lukewarm. For me, whether it was brilliant or not depended on Sofia Coppola's intentions. Given the long-standing love affair between North America and Japan, a film set in Tokyo is set to draw crowds from the word "go". In the words of Peter Brunette over at Indiewire:
In the hands of a more experienced director, this confrontation with a very foreign culture could have been a chance for some deep thinking about American naivete and innocence, but Coppola seems to be as much at sea in this foreign land as her characters.
Even worse, she loads the dice. She knows who her audience is, and knows that this audience will find a lot to identify with in Charlotte's lost, dissatisfied philosophy major. The bad people in the film, whom her audience will be predisposed to dislike, are her husband John (a shamefully wasted Giovanni Ribisi), an ambitious photographer who is neglectful of his gorgeous, sensitive wife in the most facile, clichéd ways, and, especially, a starlet named Kelly (Anna Faris) who is all southern California airhead bimbo and nothing else. It is a well-known fact that all us indie film folk prefer philosophy majors (especially from Yale) to airhead bimbos.
For me, this film was much too comfortable, and did not push the boundaries which were very obviously there — not only the confrontation with the sheer overwhelming atmosphere of Tokyo (which is not the same as Japan!), but also social status quo. "Does marriage get easier?" Charlotte had asked the night they didn't sleep together. And Bob goes on to talk about the joy of having kids. I'm sorry, but kids and marriage are different issues.
I think in the end, I'd class "Lost in Translation" the same way I did "Amelie" — highly polished films that are put together to please their audiences, shallow shells of appeal, but hardly more than that. The photography in "Lost in Translation" isn't particularly special either, though the one thing I did like a lot was the music.
Ahh, and Ginza isn't Tokyo. I appreciate that Coppola might be intentionally trying to present a shallow experience of Tokyo, but I don't think it really meant that her characters needed to be shallow too.
Posted by sniffles at September 27, 2003 01:57 PM