Lost in Translation (2003) Lost in Translation (2003)

See also: _Index | Plot Structure (Lost in Translation) | Backbeats (Lost in Translation)

Quick Facts

  • Director / Writer: Sofia Coppola
  • Starring: Bill Murray (Bob Harris, fading American film star in Tokyo to shoot Suntory whisky ads), Scarlett Johansson (Charlotte, recent Yale philosophy graduate accompanying her photographer husband on assignment), Giovanni Ribisi (John, Charlotte's husband), Anna Faris (Kelly, vapid starlet promoting an action film), Catherine Lambert (jazz singer at the Park Hyatt's New York Bar)
  • Cinematography: Lance Acord
  • Editor: Sarah Flack
  • Music: supervisor Brian Reitzell; original songs by Kevin Shields; needle-drops include My Bloody Valentine, Air, Phoenix, Death in Vegas, The Jesus and Mary Chain
  • Runtime: 102 minutes
  • Budget: approximately $4 million
  • Worldwide Box Office: approximately $118 million
  • Release Date: September 12, 2003 (US, limited)
  • Distributor: Focus Features
  • Awards: Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay (Coppola); three additional Oscar nominations including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor (Murray)

Overview

A fading film star and a young philosophy graduate, both marooned in the Park Hyatt Tokyo by professional appointments and unsleeping jet lag, drift toward each other across a week of insomnia, hotel bars, karaoke rooms, and small daylight excursions, and then say goodbye on a Shinjuku street with the man whispering something into the woman's ear that the audience is never permitted to hear. Sofia Coppola's second feature is built almost entirely out of waiting and observation — bodies in elevators, faces against windows, the distance between two beds and one ceiling — and routes its emotional weight through what is not said: the unhearable whisper, the unreturned kiss, the marriage neither partner is willing to discuss directly. The film is widely read as a study of jet-lagged interiority, of what becomes possible between two people once their normal scaffolding is removed, and of why an experience can be the most important thing that happened to you in years and yet have to end as a stranger walking back into a taxi.