Lost In Translation (2003): The Wanderers We Became

 

"Does It Get Easier?"

How beautiful it is to fall in love. To be with someone you trully care about and share good moments and nice memories. How beautiful life can become when two souls find each other, but sometimes those two souls find themselves too late and time is not on their side.

Lost In Translation is a romantic comedy-drama film written and directed by Sofia Coppola and starred by Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson. It tells the story of Bob Harris, a famous aging actor, and Charlotte, a college graduate who stays in the same Tokyo hotel. A simple, but bittersweet story about love, relationships, dreams, loneliness, and finding a purpose in the world.

The movie deals with Bob Harris, a famous actor (like Bill Murray himself) who is in Tokyo to record a couple of commercials, and has marriage troubles back at home. Meanwhile, Charlotte is a college graduate who spends her days in the hotel waiting for her husband to finish some business related to his photography. These two vastly different people lack something in their lives. Both of them wander in the hotel, killing time, looking for something, until they bump into each other. The two of them feel isolated, so little by little they begin to create a friendship despite their differences: Harris is famous and old, a man who has been married for a really long time, while Charlotte is a normal and young woman whose marriage is in diapers. 

To create a friendship between two people you need to find a connection, a link that you share something in common with that person, and in this case, it seems that our two main characters feel bored and lonely. On one hand, Harris is a famous man, but that doesn’t mean that at home he has no troubles: His marriage is a chaos. On the other hand, Charlotte is a woman who is still not sure about what her place in the world is: She feels ignored by her husband and has dreams that are not yet accomplished. She wants to write, she wants to do something with her life, but she’s not quite sure what. 

 

So, what do you do when you feel lost and find another soul like you in a city like Tokyo? The city is modern, full of people, but cold. Strangers get lost in the neon lights, the music, the culture, and the language. Everything is “lost in translation”, but the actions our main characters do are not. Silence and action are more powerful than words between Harris and Charlotte.

I really liked this movie, because it is a simple story that, at the same time, shares a deep insight into what relationships and the nature of love are. All of these surrounded by Japan, a country that caught my attention for the nice things it offers, but also for what it lacks.

Lost In Translation is a movie with heart and humanity, in which music, images, and acting play a crucial role between two people whose voices get lost, whose lives are not what they want to be, but prove that there are times when we are lost we find in each other a little glimpse of hope in our (apparently) directionless paths.