Lost in Translation

There is almost no plot in Sofia Coppola’s 2003 film: two people are awake at the wrong hours in the same hotel. The engine is jet lag, not conflict. That is worth knowing going in, because the development you keep waiting for never arrives and the final line is deliberately inaudible. Withholding what is said is not a puzzle to solve but something the film chooses to keep. The production conditions are the source of that looseness. Coppola spent months trying to recruit Bill Murray and he never signed a contract; roughly a quarter of the four million dollar budget was spent without knowing whether he would turn up in Tokyo. The shoot ran 27 days with a small crew, cinematographer Lance Acord worked mostly with available light, and street scenes were shot without permits using passers-by as extras. Rather than take a North American studio deal, Coppola sold foreign rights piecemeal specifically to keep final cut. Bob’s whisky commercial is not invented either: Coppola’s father and Akira Kurosawa shot real Suntory advertisements in the 1970s. A good fit if you do not need the thing between the two characters to be given a name. Less so if the Japanese characters being so often the object of the joke is going to sit badly with you.