Lost in Translation is my favorite movie this year (pace Return of the King), largely because, as the Virginian says in his post just below, Sofia Coppola understands Life. There are certain movies that seem to absolutely accurately reflect back at me the lens through which I view the world, and Lost in Translation is one of these movies.
Briefly - I don't believe in the currency of the genre classification my colleague suggests below, which lumps Translation into the same category with other movies he (and I) happen to adore...essentially, I think drawing an analogy to prose fiction is illustrative. I happen to personally think that every emporium of artistic media should have Duke Ellington's dictum about music blazoned above its threshold ("There are two kinds of music. Good music and the other kind."), but given that we live in a society that likes to have things cut up into categories for more efficient and less risky consumption, movies like Translation, or 25th Hour, or Five Easy Pieces, et alii ad infinitum, are the filmic equivalent of "Literature", which I happen to think is a bullshit category, but I believe the comparison holds - because their primary focus is not relating a plot, but rather exploration of character, say, or conveying a feeling or a particular set of ideas, or just an exercise in beautiful images (or sentences)...the sort of things your English teacher will tell you set Faulkner above Grisham, to name two successful Mississipian writers who had unsuccessful attempts at writing screenplays. (I think Grisham, from what I've read of him, would probably be inclined to agree.) I don't have the inclination at the moment to go into why I think "Literature" (or whatever you want to call its celluloid equivalent, maybe "Cinema" vs. "Movies", or something equally pretentious) is a bullshit category, but I have my reasons.
Anyway, as regards Ms. Coppola's current masterpiece: someone with whom I recently saw the film commented that what she thought marked it as truly great was the fact that everyone she knew who had seen it was able to talk about how it affected them and spoke to them personally, and all for different reasons. The Virginian responded, with a cynicism that sounded so out of place after such an earnest and open film that it made me flinch to realize the extent of my own cynicism (sorry buddy), that "Yeah, people our age watch it and identify with Charlotte because she doesn't know where her life is going, and our parents watch it and identify with Bob Harris because he doesn't know where his life's gone."
So, yes, there were particular moments and recurrent images in Translation that resonated personally, but overall it was the movie's entire tone. Roger Ebert's review (and incidentally, I think Ebert doesn't get nearly enough respect from opinionated and overeducated wannabe-hipsters like myself. I entirely disagree with him about one third of the time, but the rest of the time he's not only spot on, but his reviews become miniature essays on life) begins with an invocation of the Japanese mono no aware, which is described briefly in the second paragraph here. "A sensitivity to things," yes, but also at the concept's root is the identification of that sensitivity with sadness. And this concept seems not un-alien to one much closer to my own cultural heart and ken. The Portuguese concept of saudade does not have an adequate one-word translation in English, although Babelfish gamely suggests "homesickness" which, thanks AltaVista, barely scratches the surface. Saudade might as well be the Portuguese national emotion; the greatest (to my knowledge/opinion) native Portugese art form is fado, a song form whose existence essentially serves as a platform for expressing saudade. A couple of good Amalia Rodriguez recordings would undoubtedly do better for the non-Lusophone than any explication I can muster in this space, but briefly: saudade is a sort of homesickness, yes, but it's not about a physical sort of homesickness, it's about a lifelong emotional sort of homesickness, about carrying with you a sense of melancholic yet bittersweet nostalgia, the sort of emotion that has you smiling through your tears, all refracted through the prism of an intense longing - for it to be otherwise, or for it to be as it was before, or for it to continue just as it is because this moment of sadness is just so beautiful. Not to get too personal in this space, and not to over-identify with a concept central to a culture in whose language I'm just the wrong side of conversant, but I am generally an individual of saudade, and I think Lost in Translation is a film of saudade, although Ms. Coppola was undoubtedly more likely to be aware of the Japanese take on sadness than the Portuguese, having spent some time in Japan, and Portugal being what it is these days. That moment at the end after Bob whispers in Charlotte's ear and each time I see it, for a moment I can't tell whether she's going to laugh or cry. The way that these two people have no home in Japan or America. The way they look at each other in silence when the running and laughing and drinking and karaoke-ing is over, when two people who against all the odds of our dreadful world happen into a profound and deep understanding of each other, when this would be the moment where they fall into embrace, but because this is a movie that is unconcerned with such untruth, they don't. And they know it, and they are...fill in your favorite cultural signifier.
If Rob Fleming and his co-workers in High Fidelity are right, that it's just as (if not more) important what you like as it is what you are like, this movie is likely to become a litmus test for me.
