The Kyoto Excursion Lost in Translation (2003)
The Kyoto excursion — Charlotte takes the bullet train alone to Kyoto, walks the Heian Shrine garden, watches a Shinto wedding party cross a path at Nanzenji, kneels at a low table to try ikebana with an older woman, and calls Lauren and gets the same flatness as beforeb23–b24 — is the structural exhaustion of Charlotte's initial approach. It is shot as the film's most beautiful sequence, and that beauty is the point.
What happens
Charlotte boards the Shinkansen alone. The film cuts to a series of long shots of her in the Kyoto temple grounds — stepping stones across a pond, lanterns in lacquered red, the geometric calm of the Heian Shrine gravel garden, the moss and the maple of Nanzenji. At Heian a Shinto wedding party walks the path: a bride and groom in white and black, attendants under parasols. Charlotte stops, watches, takes a photograph or two. In a temple courtyard later she kneels at a low table arranging stems under quiet instruction from an older woman. The scene is silent. Her face does not change. She returns to Tokyo on the train. The phone call to Lauren that follows is short and goes nowhere.
What it does structurally
The pre-midpoint approach has reached its fullest extension. Charlotte has gone, on her own initiative, to the most prescribed possible site of profundity in Japan — the ancient capital, a Shinto wedding, ikebana under instruction, the temple gardens — and the templates have not landed. The film's argument is precise: it is not that the templates are bad, or that Kyoto is not beautiful, or that the wedding is not moving. The shots are gorgeous; the wedding is moving; the ikebana is genuinely meditative. The point is that the prescribed sources of meaning are not delivering meaning to her. The route to feeling-by-template has been exhausted.
"The Kyoto sequence is one of the most beautiful things in any American film of the 2000s — temple gardens, a bride, the long quiet shots of a young woman alone in a place she has come to feel something. And Coppola's argument is that the beauty doesn't reach her. The shots are not failures. They are the demonstration that the beautiful prescribed thing does not always do the work it is supposed to do." — Manohla Dargis, Los Angeles Times (2003)
The shoot
The Kyoto material was shot over two days by Lance Acord and a small crew, again largely without permits. The Shinto wedding party at Heian Shrine was a real wedding the production happened to encounter; Coppola has said in interviews that they asked for permission and were given it on the day.
"We went to Kyoto with very little plan. Lance and I and Scarlett and a small crew. We saw the wedding and asked if we could film. They said yes. The whole sequence is what we found. It is one of the only sequences in the movie where I think the city did most of the work." — Sofia Coppola, The Criterion Collection commentary (2004)
Why it is paired with the floor conversation
The Kyoto sequence is structurally followed, after a brief return-to-Tokyo bridge, by the midpoint floor conversation. The pairing is the film's structural turn: Charlotte has tried the most prescribed thing and it has not landed; she returns to her hotel suite and folds origami cranes; she ends up on the floor with Bob naming the gap; the post-midpoint approach can begin. The Kyoto excursion is what makes the floor conversation possible.
"Kyoto is what has to fail before the bedroom conversation can happen. Coppola lets you see Charlotte try the official path to meaning, in the most beautiful possible setting, and lets you watch it not work. Then she puts her on the floor with Bob and the film changes." — A.O. Scott, The New York Times (2013)
The "Alone in Kyoto" needle drop
The sequence is scored by Air's "Alone in Kyoto," an instrumental Coppola commissioned from the French duo specifically for the film. The piece is sparse — guitar, low synth, distant percussion — and was written before the sequence was shot.
"Sofia sent me a script and asked for music for the Kyoto scene. I wrote 'Alone in Kyoto' before I had seen any footage. When I saw the cut I was relieved that it fit." — Nicolas Godin (Air), Pitchfork (2013)