on lost in translation, by sofia coppola
When I see the walls of The Metrograph theater for the first time, I think they are like the spindled bindings of a hardcover book. The space feels embossed and wide because of it, and I love it the second I walk in. It was built in 2016, but looks about a century older. The screen is the longest I have ever seen, to better accommodate the 35 mm print of Lost in Translation that I’m here to watch. That length, and those book bindings on the walls, give the theater a cavernous acoustic quality, and I wish I could play my guitar in here. After sitting down and staring long enough, the hall becomes the inside of a submarine, something like a subterranean warship. Metal should be clanging somewhere; ironworkers should be dragging their picks from one hot pool of lava to the next. When I was a nineteen-year-old theater critic I reviewed a Cirque du Soleil show where they put on a steampunk-inspired performance on Roosevelt Island, complete with steaming automotives and the motley goods of Victorian industry. So now, in this steampunk cavern on a cold, blue Monday night in the Dimes Square neighborhood of the Lower East Side, I sit down and watch Sofia Coppola’s little movie about love.
If I can be this sentimental about a New York movie theater, whose true appearance would severely compromise my terribly romantic estimation of it as written above, then I can be sentimental about this film. Robert (Bill Murray, comical and craggy) is a directionless American actor making unsavory ad money in Tokyo. Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson, so extremely good I nearly fell in love with her myself) is the directionless product of an American liberal arts education, too intelligent for everyone, including her own self, also staying in Tokyo with her photographer husband. She cries on the phone to a friend in America, saying that when she visited a temple and heard the Buddhist monks chanting, she felt nothing. Her friend is gaily unbothered, and Charlotte weeps with such agony that my own chest flutters with the familiarity of this ennui, this eternal irritation of existence.
[Image description: Billy Murray as Robert, Scarlett Johansson as Charlotte, in a brief, soft moment outside a karaoke room in Tokyo. Directed by Sofia Coppola, 2003.]
Both Robert and Charlotte then bump into each other, and the film becomes a kind of paean to just how good a human relationship can be, and how it not only momentarily solves the question of existence, but how that relationship also renders, colors, and engineers memories with ageless lifespans, for us to look back on and smile so that we may bear the weight of the present more gladly. Rob and Charlotte careen through Tokyo’s rain-wet streets, its karaoke rooms, strip clubs, hot pot joints and underground bars, in much the same way my friends and I hurry across the dense geography of Manhattan on weekend nights. Just as I made memories and friends in the doldrums of late-night deli visits, neon glares and those two just-bright stars straining to be seen against the fire and brimstone of New York City’s skyline, Rob and Charlotte also do much the same.
They speak to each other with intentional familiarity and intimate knowledge of the other – they are kindred spirits. When they fight, they use strategies designed to bleed major arteries. When they apologize, they become grinning amnesiacs, forgetful of the pain they once lanced into each other in anger. They become inured to the other’s peevish habits, the other’s oddness, until the other becomes their very own self. Now they are no longer friends – somewhere along the way, Rob and Charlotte become lovers, but it happens slowly and unknowingly, like all good things. And it happens with nary more than a touch here, a glance there. The disparate elements of their friendship congeal, obtain structure, and finally translate into love.
Despite these ecstasies though, Coppola persists in some slight anxieties. Lost In Translation is set in Tokyo – the city is a thick maze of blue-green steam and electric lights, and all people do is get lost there. A stranger in Tokyo remains a stranger to it no matter how he tries to connect, like a fly trying to obtain residence in a honeycomb. Coppola is not immune to American superiority, especially that brand of moral and cultural superiority so typical of the early 2000s, and Tokyo is often more terrifying and inscrutable than it should be. Personhood is reserved for our two American leads. Every Japanese person we encounter is drifting about with a two-dimensionality held together by string and a rubber band.
Remember those old fantasy stories where the hero from the golden, corn-fed, sun-lit West must travel to the dark, green-jungled wastes of the East to defeat the Dark One? Because where else would darkness reside? And where else would light need to go? Still, this is a slight anxiety, which plays on my own subaltern anxieties. And the formal beauty of the movie, especially at the end, eases me. There is only one kind of magic that allows Bill Murray’s craggy face to come so close to Scarlett Johansson’s frankly Botticellian one and not have it look unethical, and that is the magic of old film. On an enormous, long screen, dotted now and then by the grey splotches of whirring 35 mm film, their two heads gently dance under amber hotel lights and grey-blue neon ones. The city of Tokyo becomes thalassic, impenetrable, and with no words said, it becomes clear that the lovers must leave each other, or drown in this deep city. And my god, how they leave each other.
As the movie pulls to an end, the acoustics of The Metrograph start to make sense to me. I am aware that there are about a hundred other people witnessing this along with me. Partly due to the bookbinding on the walls, I feel some utterly naïve brand of friendship with everyone resident inside the theater for these two hours. Every crumple of a popcorn bag, every heavy rustle of breath or creak of cushioned chair is such a welcome noise to me that it becomes a part of the movie. If they had left us in there for longer, I am sure, slowly and unknowingly, I would have loved them all, every last annoying cinephile and city slicker sitting there, but instead the lights come up and we all leave, and instead of love I have the memory of a slice of New York on a Monday evening, where I chose to sit inside an old iron tank of a theater, marvel at the walls, soften my stance on other people and reality, and walk back out into a cold, blue night.
[Image description: This is the final panel from a larger polyptych titled ‘The Voice of the City of New York Interpreted’ by Italian Futurist painter and Precisionist Joseph Stella. It is of particular delight to residents of that great borough, the only borough, Brooklyn. This last panel is itself titled ‘The Bridge’, with Stella describing it as follows: “An abstract representation of that engineering epic in steel, a sinewed span of energy.” A great analysis of the larger polyptych can be found here.]