Charlotte (Lost in Translation) Lost in Translation (2003)
Charlotte is the structural center of Lost in Translation, played by Scarlett Johansson. She is twenty-five (Johansson played her at seventeen), a recent Yale philosophy graduate, and married for two years to a celebrity photographer who has brought her to Tokyo on assignment and largely forgotten she is there. The film begins with her at the window of a Park Hyatt suite in pink panties and a sweaterb2, and it is built around the question of how she will register meaning in a life whose prescribed sources of it have stopped delivering.
Who she is
Charlotte is precisely drawn — Yale philosophy degree, recent marriage to a photographer she is no longer sure she knew, a clear sense that she should be doing something with her life and an unclear sense of what. The film does not give her a backstory in the conventional sense; it gives her a present-tense interior. Sofia Coppola has said in interviews that she wrote the character partly out of her own twenties — the period of her life when she was "between things" and not sure what those things were.
"I wanted Charlotte to be the kind of young woman I had been, and the kind of young woman a lot of my friends were. Educated, married too early, in a hotel room in a foreign city, not sure what she was supposed to be doing with the rest of her life. That's a real category of person." — Sofia Coppola, The New York Times (2003)
The initial approach
Charlotte's project for the first half of the film is to find the shape of a meaningful life from outside templates. She visits a Tokyo shrine and reports back to Lauren that the monks were chanting and "I didn't feel anything"b5. She tries ikebana. She folds origami cranes in the suite while a "Find Your Soul's Purpose" cassette plays.b22 She takes the bullet train alone to Kyoto and walks the Heian Shrine garden and watches a Shinto wedding party,b23 and tries ikebana under instruction in a temple courtyard.b24
The pre-midpoint approach reaches its fullest extension in the Kyoto sequence (see The Kyoto Excursion) and its fullest failure in the second flat call to Lauren that follows. The route to feeling-by-template has been exhausted by the time she returns to fold cranes on the bed.
The post-midpoint approach
The floor conversation in Bob's suiteb25 is the film's structural pivot. Charlotte tells Bob "I'm stuck" and "I just don't know what I'm supposed to be." Bob, without intending to, articulates the post-midpoint epistemics — the more you know who you are and what you want, the less the templates need to land. From this point her approach shifts from finding shape from outside to receiving the texture of the actual experience as it is.
The post-midpoint stretch is the new approach being practiced before anyone has called it that. The narrowed lunches; the kabuki sat through in silence;b29 the absorption of the demonstration that Bob is not a saint of the bounded experience (the discovery of Catherine in his suite,b31 the silent shabu-shabu broken by the deadpan apologyb32); the deadline named on the street outside the fire alarm.b34
The climax and after
The street whisper at the climaxb37 is the post-midpoint approach in its purest form: a private, untransferable, fully real exchange that does not need to be translated to be what it is. Charlotte's face changes; she nods; she turns back into the city. The film does not show what happens next. The new equilibrium is interior: she has had one experience clear enough to know that her capacity to register meaning is intact, and the experience is whole because it ended.
"Charlotte is one of the great young-woman roles of twenty-first-century American cinema. The film trusts her interior to carry the whole structure, and Johansson at seventeen rises to that trust completely." — Manohla Dargis, Los Angeles Times (2003)
The marriage
Charlotte's marriage to John is part of what the film is about. John is on screen for perhaps fifteen minutes totalb8; he flatters the band he is shooting; he hugs Kelly with more obvious warmth than he has shown his wifeb10; he leaves for Fukuoka without registering that this is a problem. Charlotte's "I just don't know who I married" on the phone to Laurenb5 is the film's most direct statement of the marriage problem.