Suntory Time Lost in Translation (2003)
The Suntory whisky shootb4 is the film's first major set-piece and the comic engine of its first act. Bob sits in a tuxedo on a black-curtained set with a glass of Hibiki whisky while a Japanese director — played by the working actor Yutaka Tadokoro — delivers long, animated, theatrical instructions in Japanese that the polite interpreter compresses into a single English sentence. Bob lands the tagline — "For relaxing times, make it Suntory time" — without conviction, take after take.
How the joke works
The bit is structured as a cumulative escalation. The director gives a thirty-second monologue about how Bob should think of the whisky as if it were an old friend or a lover; the interpreter says, "He wants you to turn and look at the camera." Bob asks if there was anything else; the interpreter says no. The pattern repeats. The film is staging the linguistic gap as a comic structural fact rather than a joke at anyone's expense — the director is not being mocked; the interpreter is not being mocked; even Bob is not exactly being mocked.
"The Suntory shoot is the funniest scene in the movie and also the saddest. Bob is being paid two million dollars to look bored on camera while the world's most famous director of whisky commercials gives him notes he will never hear. The film makes you laugh at it and feel sorry for him in the same beat." — A.O. Scott, The New York Times (2003)
The real Suntory tradition
Suntory has been hiring American film stars for Japanese-domestic whisky commercials since the 1970s — Sammy Davis Jr., Sean Connery, Mickey Rourke, Francis Ford Coppola (Sofia Coppola's father, in a famous 1980s campaign), Akira Kurosawa, and many others have done them. The fees are large; the spots run only in Japan; American audiences mostly never see them. The convention is part of the cultural backdrop of the film: doing the Japanese whisky commercial is what aging Western stars do for the money, and everyone in the industry knows it.
"The Suntory thing is real. My father did a Suntory commercial for Akira Kurosawa in the 1980s. I grew up knowing that doing the Japanese whisky ad was the thing American stars did when they didn't want to be seen doing it at home. I wanted to put that in the movie." — Sofia Coppola, The New York Times (2003)
Translation as a structural argument
The scene establishes the film's central interest in the gap between what is said and what arrives. The director's long instructions become one short sentence; Bob's polite confusion becomes a take that the director thinks is wrong; the whole machinery of the shoot is a system for producing footage that will mean nothing to anyone in either language. This is the version of the film's title that operates at the level of plot. The deeper version — the gap between the templates that are supposed to deliver meaning and the meaning a person can actually register — operates at the level of theme and is the subject of the entire post-midpoint stretch.
"The brilliance of the opening Suntory scene is that it teaches you how to watch the rest of the movie. You learn that translation here is not a problem to be solved but a structural fact about being a person in a foreign place — and by extension, about being a person at all." — Stephanie Zacharek, Salon (2003)
The Matthew Minami coda
Bob's later appearance on the manic Matthew Minami variety showb28 is the formal coda to the Suntory scene — another set, another set of instructions in another language, another demonstration that the prescribed forms of his job continue to fail him in the same way the prescribed forms of meaning have failed Charlotte. The pairing is structural: the film is arguing that Bob's professional alienation and Charlotte's existential alienation are the same shape.