IN LONELINESS

lost in translation

finding company in loneliness

Words by Jenny Jung

I was on the bus on my way to school one summer, years ago, when I came to a realisation that there was something wrong with the way I related to the world around me. I didn’t feel one with my surroundings, nor was I fully engaged with conversations and interactions I had with people, not even with my closest friends – I realised that I had been simulating existence.

It was a feeling of complete disharmony, a heightened awareness of the absurdity of my surroundings. With each passing month, each year, people became even more alien. The gap between my consciousness and the surface of my skull only seemed to grow further.

I first watched Lost in Translation in my final year of high school, a few years ago from now. Even though I wasn’t navigating an unfamiliar place or trying – and failing – to communicate with people who don’t speak my language, I resonated so much with what the characters were experiencing. An epiphany hit: there wasn’t anything wrong with me – I was just lonely.

It is one thing to be lonely from being alone – feeling lonely even when constantly surrounded by people and activities is a whole different animal and Lost in Translation captures this experience so well. The main characters Bob (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) are both questioning their place within their lives. They aren’t quite happy in their respective marriages, nor do they have a certain future in terms of their careers. Bob is a washed-up, irrelevant movie star now taking random commercials and gigs to stay afloat, while Charlotte is fresh out of university, trying to make sense of her place in the world and in her marriage to a pretentious, hipster-photographer-husband. They both end up in Tokyo, somewhat unwillingly, and find each other sticking out like a sore thumb in a tacky hotel bar.

Bob and Charlotte are both observers. They understand the absurdity of the world and struggle to immerse themselves in it. Sofia Coppola conveys this sentiment in such an easily digestible way without compromising any of its heartbreaking nuance. The whole film has a flat, two-dimensional appearance that produces dream-like, pictorial imagery that downplays realism.

The Japanese characters are exaggerated caricatures, sometimes uncomfortably stereotypical and teetering on racist. However, it undeniably does the trick in making the audience understand the alienation the main characters are feeling. Bob, upon arriving in Japan, is rushed around by an entourage of Japanese staff to various ad campaigns where the photographers speak very little English, vaguely and distantly throwing around pop culture tokens in an effort to direct Bob. He tries to make it work with what little direction he’s getting, but winds up just getting frustrated. Charlotte also seems to share this feeling of disconnect with her surroundings. In one of the first scenes with Charlotte, she’s left to her own devices after her husband leaves for work when she decides to visit a Japanese temple; in a place where she cannot find connection through conversation or culture, perhaps spirituality can offer a common language. She watches the monks chant and people pray. Yet she feels nothing – something she tries to explain over the phone with a friend in vain, as even she does not have time to speak with her. This feeling of being stranded and out-of-sync with even our closest connections is also visible in Bob’s communications with his wife; they communicate through short, scribbled notes passed back and forth through fax – for reference, this film was made in the early noughties, and this method still seems ridiculously fiddly and archaic even for the time.

But when the two main characters meet, there is an instant familiarity, as if they had been led to each other by some cosmic force. There is an unspoken yet instant understanding that they both just don’t want to be there. As they sit side by side at the hotel bar, they jokingly draw up an escape plan in which they leave Tokyo and start up a jazz band. In fact, most of their interactions, especially earlier in the film, are set inside the hotel, one way or another – an unchanging backdrop, somehow perpetually night-time yet simultaneously a vacuum which exists outside of time. It leaves the viewer with a knowing, a heaviness in their heart, that Bob and Charlotte’s time together does not exist outside of Tokyo, Japan.

They fill each other’s sleepless nights with adventures, difficult conversations about their unhappy marriages – such understated yet powerful intimacy. Bob and Charlotte don’t need to fill space with vapid and cartoonish romantic companionship that Charlotte and her husband constantly seem to find themselves doing; they are more than content just knowing that each other exists, and that they have managed to find each other. I love the scene where they are both lying in bed together purely platonically, then when Charlotte confesses that she feels ‘stuck’, Bob just gently, without a word, lays his hand on her foot.

Our two main characters, having now found each other’s company, seem to start enjoying the vibrant Tokyo nightlife. They start to find strangers interesting, Japanese culture enjoyable, and most importantly, find themselves having a good time. They go partying, to karaoke, and even to a strip club. And when it’s time to go home, they sit in the taxi together, Sometimes by My Bloody Valentine playing (Coppola being the master of pop soundtracks), and when Charlotte looks out of the window at the passing cityscape, I can almost feel what she’s thinking.

Loneliness isn’t derived from lack of company. There comes a certain point in our lives when we are disillusioned by the goodness of the world and of our own invincibility. When we realise that we are truly alone and stranded in the world, we find ourselves alienated – our souls curl up within our bodies. I grew up learning not to expect much of the world and was eventually unable to relate myself to my surroundings, not even the people that I felt I’d loved the most - how I’d clung on so desperately to escape this feeling, and to no avail. Japan didn’t make Bob and Charlotte feel lonely. Throughout the film we are made aware of the insecure humans they are, how unfulfilling their jobs and marriages are, and the fear they have for their future. Though one a middle-aged, irrelevant movie star making his way out of the industry, and another a recent graduate in philosophy 2 years into a marriage, they have both been rejected by life, and they are able to bond over the special perspective that loneliness grants.

Like all good movies, we aren’t given the satisfaction of a happy ending – hell, we don’t even get closure. As dreaded, Bob and Charlotte each need to go home, return to their lives, and somehow get over the reality that

they know their soulmate is out there somewhere, just not in their own homes. It keeps me up at night, thinking how I would cope with such a tragedy – would it motivate me to leave my unhappy marriage? Would I try to find my way back to Scarlett Johansson? At the end I always come to the conclusion that, maybe, their encounter was never meant to be a long stay in the first place. Maybe Bob and Charlotte were, to each other, the universe’s reminder, that they aren’t really alone, to let yourself really live; kind of like how one reaffirms their faith in life after seeing an exceptionally beautiful sunset. Because it really just takes that one person, regardless of if they stay.

And in the end, I don’t really need to know what Bob says to Charlotte at the end of the movie. Because I think I know what I would say, and I think that’s more than I can ask to take away from Lost In Translation.