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I am fond of saying that one of the factors that makes movies good is that “good films show you things rather than telling them to you”. (It is probably derivative of something François Truffaut said, but I wouldn’t know what.) I think a corollary to this is that “a good film is a book that every viewer reads; a great film is a canvas that every viewer paints on”. By this standard (as well as most others), Lost in Translation is a great film. Everyone I find experienced the same thing, and found a different piece of themselves in it. It manages to evoke a wide range of feelings by saying so little.

Upon leaving the film and commenting that I enjoyed it, someone said to me that it was “profoundly depressing”; a sentiment that I can appreciate but did not share. Another friend asked me whether it made me more inclined to visit Japan, and I said it would. He agreed, but mentioned that the people he saw the movie with had the opposite conclusion. So I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that my usual post-movie ritual of browsing film reviews from the internet to see if any described my feelings was an utter bust.

This is a great story, well made with a fantastic sense of place. But to me it also plays as a critique of movies and their conventions. Most movies feel the need to tell you a grand story, full of important events in the characters’ lives and moments of dramatic tension and revelation. Doing all of this in the length of a movie means requires filmmakers to tell their stories as economically as possible. Movies reduce anything they can to caricature, be it locations, characters’ backgrounds and motivations, or dramatic events. This is not necessarily done because the filmmaker is unoriginal, but rather because it quickly gives the audience something they know how to latch onto, so that the story can move ahead. But when you step out of the movie theater, you realize that you spent an exciting couple of hours with people and places with a little less depth than those that surround you everyday.

Lost in Translation is a glorious counterpoint to this phenomenon. Here is a movie that is constantly reminding you about how little you understand the characters and the places they inhabit (both physically and emotionally). Tokyo seems more foreign than any distant Star Trek planet, and spending more time there doesn’t promote cultural understanding; it just prompts more confusion. Even things that should be familiar, like weddings or American pop songs end up being all the more disorienting. (Coppola never destroys this effect by creating a moment of cultural understanding.) Dramatically, the movie spends its hundred minutes setting up a few gloriously nuanced moments of intimacy and longing. And even then you are keenly aware that you are seeing a small sliver of these characters lives, which are just as huge as ours. In fact, I am reluctant to call the two principal inhabitants of this movie characters. They are more like people who happen to live in a movie. That is why the end of the movie isn’t taunting you by giving them an intimate moment away from the camera; it is reminding you that you wouldn’t really understand anyway.

Despite the simplicity of the story, Coppola fills the movie with details for us to latch on to. A woman who is close in age to Charlotte pointed out to me that she wears a bracelet which ‘every woman my age owns’. Personally, I gasped when the soundtrack to driving around Tokyo was a great My Bloody Valentine song. It immediately took me back ten years, to being someone quite more like Charlotte than I am today. (This movie, much like American Beauty, uses the disorientation of being a young adult and being middle aged as a counterpoint. I continue to be between the two, and imagine that if I watch the films again in several years I may be identifying with different characters.) These are just a few of the reasons that Lost in Translation is distinctively the product of a filmmaker who is a young woman, something which is entirely too rare. I am sure it is possible to learn about My Bloody Valentine outside of a dorm room, but I there is no proof that anyone has. And I hate to say that someone’s gender determines how they work, but I have a hard time imagining a man dealing as matter-of-factly with the bizarreness of Japanese sexuality. I would expect them to either need to make it more exciting or treat it more apologetically.

It is also worth mentioning that parts of this movie are really funny. In fact, much like in movies I love by Billy Wilder and Ang Lee, the humor is essential to making its dramatic elements work. Reading about the movie makes it sound far less fun to watch then it really is.

I wrote earlier about loving Coppola’s first movie despite the opinions of most critics and moviegoers. It is thrilling to see that she has gotten even better while becoming better appreciated.

Rating: 9/10