What Lost in Translation gets right about being bored in a hotel
Sofia Coppola's 2003 film is often described as a love story. It is, but only secondarily. Primarily it is a film about being awake at 3am in a country you don't speak.
The single most-quoted shot in Lost in Translation (Coppola, 2003) is the one of Bill Murray sitting in the Park Hyatt Tokyo's bar at night, drink in hand, the city's lights through the window behind him. The shot was used on the poster, on every DVD case, in nearly every retrospective. It is the film's icon.
What is being depicted in the icon, formally, is jet lag. The man is awake at the wrong hour, in a place where it is the wrong hour, in a body that does not yet know what time it is. He is bored. He is alone. The bar is open because international hotels keep their bars open for exactly this state. He is not in a story. He is between activities the way you are between two flights — there is nothing to do, no one to call, no acceptable way to make it 6am faster.
Most films about being in a foreign country are films about adventure. Lost in Translation is not. It is a film about waiting for a foreign country to end.
The accuracy of the boredom
I want to defend the word boredom here, because the film's critical reception in 2003 occasionally treated it as a criticism: "nothing happens." Nothing happens, in Lost in Translation, in the same sense that nothing happens in a Yasujirō Ozu film, or in the slower stretches of a Hong Sang-soo film. The "nothing" is the subject. People misread it as the absence of one.
Coppola's specific accomplishment is rendering the textures of nothing accurately. The hotel room at the end of a 12-hour flight. The closed curtains, opened, that reveal an unfamiliar sky. The unfamiliar TV with twelve unfamiliar channels. The minibar's contents, examined and rejected. The shower in a country where the controls are written in a script you don't read. The lobby, with its silent staff and inscrutable kindness. The bar, where the only English-speakers are American or British and want to be left alone.
If you have ever traveled internationally on business, alone, you know this. Coppola knows it because she has done it (her family's industry routinely sends people to Tokyo for two weeks; she shot the film at the actual Park Hyatt, where she had stayed). The film accumulates concrete texture from concrete experience. That's why it works.
The romance is secondary
The relationship between Murray's character (Bob, a middle-aged American actor doing a whiskey commercial) and Scarlett Johansson's character (Charlotte, the young wife of a photographer working in Tokyo) is the film's plot. Almost every review fastens onto it. The famous final scene — Murray whispers something inaudible to Johansson on a Tokyo street — became, deservedly, one of the cinema's notable closures.
But formally, the relationship is the vector that lets the film exist, not its content. Bob and Charlotte are people meeting in a foreign hotel because they cannot sleep. What they actually do together is small: they go to a karaoke bar. They visit a temple. They have a drink. They talk in her hotel room about marriage and uncertainty. The minor scale of the actions is the point. The romance is calibrated to be a relief from the boredom, not an answer to it.
This is rare. Films are addicted to escalation. Lost in Translation refuses. The film ends approximately where it started — both characters still uncertain, still going home to relationships they're not sure about, still essentially alone — and the whispered final line does not promise a future. The whisper is the film admitting it doesn't know either.
What it means to recommend it
I have always found Lost in Translation a difficult film to recommend, because the recommendation tends to mislead the recipient. If I tell you "it's a love story set in Tokyo," you will expect Tokyo to be involved as a setting in the romantic sense — picturesque, exotic, vivid. Lost in Translation's Tokyo is none of those things. It is the Tokyo of a person who is mostly inside a hotel and who cannot read any sign.
If I tell you "it's slow but worth it," I'll lose the audience who reads "slow" as a warning. The film isn't slow. It's correctly paced for the experience it depicts. Boredom in a hotel room cannot be conveyed quickly. It has to be sat with. Coppola sits with it.
The right viewer for Lost in Translation is someone who has spent time alone in a hotel in a city they don't speak. That viewer recognizes the film instantly. The wrong viewer is someone who is twenty-two and looking for a romance film, who will, fairly, find it cold and undramatic. Twenty years on, the right audience for this film has grown. The number of people who travel internationally for work, alone, has expanded. The cohort who saw the film at 22 in 2003 and didn't connect, saw it again at 38 in 2019, and got it. That's typical of slow films. They wait.
Why this site exists, in one paragraph
What Lost in Translation models, for our purposes, is the kind of film our site is trying to surface: a film whose virtues are quiet, whose pacing rewards a specific viewer, and whose first audience often wasn't the right one. The recommendation engines that drive most streaming services optimize for the loud signal — the films that get a big reaction from a big audience quickly. Lost in Translation's signal is small and slow. It returns over a longer time scale. We are trying to build something that surfaces those films before you have to be 38 to find them.
The film page is here. If you haven't seen it, save it for an evening you can afford to be tired in.
Sources & further reading
- Criterion Collection — Lost in Translation release page
- Rogers, Anna. Sofia Coppola: The Politics of Visual Pleasure (Berghahn Books, 2018) — extended chapter on the Tokyo material.
- The Guardian — The Lost Years, Coppola interview (2003)
- The New York Times — original 2003 festival review (A. O. Scott)