Lost in Translation and Slow Cinema Lost in Translation (2003)
Lost in Translation is sometimes filed, in the academic and festival-circuit critical literature, with the loose international tendency since the late 1990s known as Slow Cinema — a category that includes the Taiwanese pictures of Tsai Ming-liang and Hou Hsiao-hsien, the Thai work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul, the Argentine films of Lisandro Alonso, the Hungarian films of Béla Tarr, and a generation of European art-house directors working in long takes, minimal plot, and ambient time. The fit is partial — Lost in Translation is a Hollywood-financed, ninety-minute studio picture with a movie star at its center — but the partial fit is structurally interesting.
What Slow Cinema is
The term Slow Cinema was coined in critical writing in the mid-2000s, around the same time Lost in Translation was released, to describe a set of films that share certain formal commitments: long takes, minimal narrative incident, an interest in duration as a subject in its own right, an indifference to conventional pacing, and a willingness to let the viewer's attention wander.
"Slow Cinema is not a movement and it is not a school. It is a set of formal preferences shared by an international group of directors who, mostly without coordinating, arrived at similar answers to the same questions about what cinema in the post-television age should be doing." — Matthew Flanagan, 16:9 (2008)
The canonical Slow Cinema directors — Tsai, Hou, Tarr, Reygadas, Alonso, Apichatpong — generally work outside the Hollywood system, on small budgets, with non-professional actors, and with running times that often exceed three hours.
Where Lost in Translation fits the description
Lost in Translation shares several Slow Cinema formal commitments. It is built almost entirely out of waiting and observation; it has no conventional plot incidents until the climax; it allows duration to be a subject (the long opening shot of Charlotte at the windowb2, the kabuki sat through in silenceb29); it photographs interior states through ambient sound and mood; and it values stillness and silence over information.
"Coppola is not a Slow Cinema director, but Lost in Translation is the film a Slow Cinema director would have made if they had been given a movie star and a Hollywood budget. It is the most Slow-Cinema-friendly film in the American studio system of its decade." — Nick James, Sight & Sound (2010)
Coppola has cited Wong Kar-wai (especially In the Mood for Love, 2000), Hou Hsiao-hsien (especially Café Lumière, 2003 — also a Tokyo film), Antonioni (the Monica Vitti trilogy), and Eric Rohmer in many interviews as direct influences.
Where it does not fit
The fit is partial because Lost in Translation is not, by Slow Cinema standards, slow. The film runs 102 minutes, has a movie star, has a clear three-act structure, and has a recognizable Hollywood emotional payoff. Its longest single take is well under a minute. It uses music, often, to direct the viewer's emotional response. The Slow Cinema directors it admires would probably consider it a fast film.
"Lost in Translation is fast cinema by the standards of Tsai Ming-liang. The fact that it can be discussed in the same breath says less about its slowness than about how unbearably fast Hollywood cinema usually is." — Justin Chang, Variety (2010)
What the partial fit illuminates
What is interesting about the partial fit is how much of the Slow Cinema vocabulary turns out to be available inside the studio system if a director with sufficient leverage chooses to use it. Lost in Translation shows that the long-take, ambient-sound, duration-as-subject mode can be deployed inside a 102-minute movie-star Hollywood feature without breaking the form, and that the result can be a $4-million picture that grosses $118 million worldwide.
The film's specific stylistic influence — handheld available-light foreign-city cinematography, dream-pop and shoegaze soundtracks, women in luxury hotels, the bounded experience as plot — is visible in Marie Antoinette (2006), Somewhere (2010), Jim Jarmusch's Only Lovers Left Alive (2013), Mike Mills's Beginners (2010) and 20th Century Women (2016), and the broader lineage of mid-2010s American art-pop cinema.