Catherine (Lost in Translation) Lost in Translation (2003)
Catherine is the jazz lounge singer at the Park Hyatt's New York Bar whose set runs under several of the film's bar scenes and who eventually goes home with Bob. She is played by Catherine Lambert, the Toronto-based jazz singer who was performing the actual residency at the New York Bar at the time Coppola heard her sing and offered her the role. The character is the structural rupture in the film's middle act — the demonstration that Bob is not a saint of the bounded experience.
What the character does
Catherine is present in the background of the film for most of its second half, performing in the New York Bar. She comes over to Bob after closing, friendly and direct.b30 Bob, lonely and tired, is responsive. She goes to his suite. The next morning Charlotte arrives at the door to fetch Bob for lunch and hears the woman's voice in his suite; she steps back and quietly retreats without announcing herself.b31
The film does not stage a confrontation. It stages the small deflating recognition. Charlotte goes to lunch alone (she will be silent at the shabu-shabu when Bob arrives), and the post-midpoint approach has to absorb the demonstration that Bob is not a saint.
Why the character is treated with care
The film's treatment of Catherine is structurally generous. She is not a villain, she is not cruel, she does not interfere with anything. She is a working jazz singer in a hotel bar who has met a lonely middle-aged man and gone home with him. The film does not punish her, judge her, or use her for cheap satire. She is the demonstration that the experience between Bob and Charlotte exists inside an actual life with all the messiness that entails.
"The lounge singer is a figure the film treats with real care. She's not a villain. She's not really even an interruption. She's the demonstration that what's happening between Bob and Charlotte exists inside a real life, with all the messiness that entails." — A.O. Scott, The New York Times (2003)
The "Midnight at the Oasis" scene
Catherine returns to the film for a final scene. After the fire alarm has emptied the Park Hyatt onto the street and Bob has told Charlotte he is leaving in the morning,b34 the two return to the New York Bar and sit at a small table near the band. Catherine is on the stage singing "Midnight at the Oasis."b35 Bob and Charlotte sit shoulder-to-shoulder and let the song play out. The arrangement of bodies is the only statement made.
The scene is structurally elegant: the woman who was the rupture is now performing the ambient music for the recovery. The film is arguing, in its quiet way, that the post-midpoint approach has had to absorb the rupture and has held — and that the absorption looks like sitting next to each other and listening to a song the woman who slept with Bob the night before is singing on the stage.
The doubling with Lauren
Catherine Lambert is also the uncredited voice of Lauren on the phone in the shrine callb5 and the Kyoto follow-up.b24 The doubling is rarely noticed and is part of Coppola's economical-cast aesthetic — the same voice plays both Charlotte's friend who cannot hold attention on the phone and the singer who briefly takes Bob's attention. The doubling is not meaningful in any obvious symbolic sense; it is a small piece of small-budget casting that has acquired the patina of significance because viewers find it.