Plot Summary (Lost in Translation) Lost in Translation (2003)
Bob Harris, an American film star whose career has settled into the kind of work he no longer needs to be proud of, arrives in Tokyo to shoot a series of Suntory whisky commercials for a fee of two million dollars.b1 He is met at the Park Hyatt by a small staff who already know his name, and by faxes from his wife Lydia about which carpet sample he prefers for the office at home.b3 He cannot sleep.
In a suite several floors above, Charlotte sits at the window in pink underwear and a sweater while her husband John sleeps behind her.b2 She is twenty-five, recently graduated from Yale with a degree in philosophy, and married to a celebrity photographer who has brought her to Tokyo on assignment and then largely forgotten she is there. On the phone to a friend back home she tries to describe a visit to a Tokyo shrine where she watched monks chanting and "didn't feel anything"; the friend asks her to hold and never quite returns.b5
For the first half-hour the film keeps Bob and Charlotte in the same building without putting them in the same plot. They share a mirrored elevator without speaking;b6 they exchange a small toast across the New York Bar at three in the morning;b9 Bob endures a Suntory shoot where the director's long instructions arrive through an interpreter as a single sentence,b4 a "premium fantasy" hostess sent by his Japanese client,b11 and Lydia's calls about burgundy versus another shade of carpet.b14 The starlet Kelly, in town for an action-film junket, recognizes Bob in the lobby, gushes at him, and tells Charlotte "not everybody went to Yale."b10
Charlotte calls Bob's room and invites him out for the night with her Tokyo friends.b15 The night runs through a small apartment where someone is firing a BB gun at the wall,b16 a bar where Charlotte performs "Brass in Pocket" in a pink wig,b17 and a karaoke box where Bob, rumpled and committed, sings Roxy Music's "More Than This" as Charlotte watches him without irony.b18 Back at the hotel she falls asleep on his shoulder in the elevator; he carries her down the corridor and tucks her into bed without staying.b19
Charlotte takes the bullet train alone to Kyoto and walks the Heian Shrine garden, watches a Shinto wedding party cross the path, and tries ikebana in a temple courtyard.b23 A second call to her friend goes the way the first one did.b24 Late that night, head-to-head on top of the covers in Bob's suite, Charlotte tells him "I'm stuck." He says the more you know who you are and what you want, the less you let things upset you. She asks whether marriage gets easier; he says that is hard.b25
In the days that follow they have lunches, sit through a kabuki performance they do not need to translate,b29 and continue to track each other across the building. Catherine, the lounge singer at the New York Bar, flirts with Bob after her set; he sleeps with her.b30 Charlotte hears the woman's voice in his room the next morning and quietly retreats.b31 A shabu-shabu lunch begins in silence and is salvaged by a deadpan apology about cooking your own food.b32 A fire alarm empties the Park Hyatt onto the street at three in the morning;b33 Bob tells her he is leaving tomorrow; she says, "I'll miss you."b34
The lobby goodbye the next morning is staged as the failure case — handshakes, "have a great flight," the elevator doors closing on his polite smile.b36 On the way to the airport Bob spots Charlotte through the car window walking in a Shinjuku crowd, has the driver stop, weaves through pedestrians, and catches her. He embraces her, whispers something into her ear that the audio mix denies the audience entirely, kisses her once, and walks back to the cab.b37 The Jesus and Mary Chain's "Just Like Honey" rises over Tokyo as Charlotte turns back into the city.b38