It is in some ways a charming artifact of a time in the early millennium before user experience was meticulously accounted for and when movie trailers took longer than milliseconds to upload, offering a sense of reward when they finally rolled. In other ways, it feels prescient for how people would come to understand the film years after its filters and afterglows had worn off. Though I’m sure it was not intended, it captured in amber what the film was about at its core. Everyone wants to be found. It is a true and incomplete thought. People want to be found, yes. Most of us long to be discovered, seen, and known by another. Despite those 245 critics gushing over the film as a simple but poignant portrayal of isolation giving way to friendship, I cannot help but see the asymmetry of that discovery. To me, the site reads the same way the film does: There is a peripheral woman who finds an important man. She looks at him longingly despite any apparent thing about him to long for. When I watched the film at the age of eighteen, I felt cheated that this was the sort of man I was supposed to be satisfied, even excited, was coming to find me.
That first viewing of Lost in Translation was characterized by boredom and bewilderment. Though I was not yet radicalized into wild hopes for a world of gender equity and I still harbored fantasies of saving undeserving men from themselves, I still felt as if something was amiss. My male peers ogled Johansson in the role of Charlotte, her first shot on-screen famously being a close-up of her ass. To lust after her was indeed their right, even their obligation. Charlotte’s loveliness and soft-spoken wit are in sharp contrast to her absentee traveling companion, a vapid celebrity photographer husband who is based loosely on Coppola’s ex-husband, director Spike Jonze. Johansson was stunning in the film, and she remains so today. For those of us who came of age around the turn of the millennium, Johansson embodied ideals of beauty and sex appeal held by both men and women. Her figure helped usher out the 1990s monopoly that fashion-model thinness held over the female bodies of A-list Hollywood for the decade prior, the proportions of which were still well beyond the realm of mortals. I can’t bring myself to resent her beauty because it is so distant from my possible reality that I’m not able even to aspire to it, so I simply admire it.
The film would become a foundational document to the present mythology of Johansson and lovely girls everywhere. What I resent is how her beauty functioned in the film, not as a perk to a memorable and desirable character but as the defining feature that rendered her memorable and desirable. Johansson is a tremendous talent, but in Lost in Translation, she plays little more than a mirror in which I feared that the young men around me watched Lost in Translation and were granted permission to languish for decades before they had to realize the value of the gentle beauty that surrounded them in the form of unhappy but hopeful girls.
The reviews of the film by men reflect a thorough satisfaction with a state of affairs in which very young women are conduits for older men’s self-discovery. Peter Travers at Rolling Stone wrote, “The movie isn’t girly in the way The Virgin Suicides sometimes was. Coppola has found her voice with this artfully evanescent original screenplay. When she brings Bob and Charlotte together, the tone seems exactly right.” Because apparently it is impossible to praise a woman’s professional growth without cutting down her previous work. (And for the record, The Virgin Suicides was girly because it was about five girls.) Travers closed his review with the line, “Funny how a wisp of a movie from a wisp of a girl can wipe you out.”2 Never mind that Coppola was a thirty-one-year-old woman when she made the film; Travers lets her alluring thinness and notable beauty turn her into a mere girl, where she can fit into the mythology of the wisp whose sole purpose is delivering daydreams to grown men.
Elvis Mitchell at the New York Times wrote, “Ms. Johansson is not nearly as accomplished a performer as Mr. Murray, but Ms. Coppola gets around this by using Charlotte’s simplicity and curiosity as keys to her character.” Now, with all due respect to Mr. Mitchell, Murray was not so much accomplished in comparison as he was just a lot fucking older. That he champions adult female simplicity as a strong quality reveals more about him than it does about the film’s stars. Mitchell tellingly concluded, “As a result of Ms. Coppola’s faith, this is really Mr. Murray’s movie.”3
Peter Rainer at New York magazine is less boorish in his assessment but is also ultrasympathetic to Murray’s character. He refers to issues like Bob’s wife’s “needling queries about home redecoration” in lieu of details like how Bob forgot his son’s birthday or acknowledging that this needling wife is managing their family on her own. Rainer continues, “He and Charlotte aren’t lovers in any physical sense, but they enjoy the novelty of each other’s company. They know that this is one of those far-flung friendships that will last only for the length of their stay, and it’s sweeter (and more unsettling) for being so.”4
As was his custom, Roger Ebert reviewed the film with more empathy than his peers but also belabored the point that the film was about friendship primarily: “They share something as personal as their feelings rather than something as generic as their genitals.”5
But denying the erotic tension of the film is to be willfully ignorant of the rituals of courtship and desire that pervade the relationship between Bob and Charlotte. Nowhere is this dynamic more evident than during the scenes in which Bob and Charlotte go out for partying and karaoke in Tokyo. Bob shows up at Charlotte’s hotel room wearing bright orange camouflage, about which Charlotte laughs good-naturedly rather than being horrified. “You really are having a midlife crisis, aren’t you?” she asks as flirtation rather than concern. They stand too close and stare too long. Charlotte sings “Brass in Pocket” more seductively than Chrissie Hynde likely ever intended, and the pair exchange more “fuck me” eyes at karaoke than one can keep count of. At the end of the night, Bob carries a drunk Charlotte back to the hotel. Though a friend would force their drunk companion to lean on them and stumble, Bob holds her entire body in his arms in the manner of a groom carrying his wife over the threshold. He removes her shoes before tucking her into bed. Then he takes a few moments to watch her sleep before departing.
When Bob returns to his room, he drunk-dials his wife back in the United States. She is trying to get their child to eat, and Bob insists impotently from half a world away that the child eat because he told her to. His wife is clearly distressed and insists on returning to her unenviable duties and hangs up, just as Bob prepares to say “I love you.” He says, “That was a stupid idea,” to his empty room, somehow unaware that calling his wife in an attempt to repair the family he has neglected is likely one of the most decent things he’s done in ages. The moment is a chance to redeem himself from the haplessness that has characterized much of his relationship, and he thwarts it with a juvenile self-conscious.