Lost in Translation

 

Lost in Translation

2003

Director: Sofia Coppola

Starring: Bill Murray, Scarlett Johansson, Giovanni Ribisi

I need to say this straight off the bat: I can’t write a normal review of Lost in Translation.  Expect precious little of what’s to follow to be my typical attempts at any sort of analysis of the filmmaking techniques, production design, or story symbolism.  Apologies if that’s what you wanted.

Right. On with it then.

I’ve only seen Lost in Translation twice; once, in 2004 after it came out on DVD, and just a few days ago for the 1001 Movies Blog Club.  Despite the decade since I last saw it, I vividly remember that initial experience.  It was late at night, I was a little tired, my then-boyfriend-now-husband had gone to bed, and I sat down to watch this film that my friend Dyami had been gushing over.  I really enjoyed it – I knew I would – but as it came to a close, I remember being overcome by incredible emotion.  I remember sobbing my way through the final scenes, then continuing to sob rather uncontrollably for at least another thirty minutes.  Something in this film had touched a nerve, a very raw nerve, that the lateness of the hour and my tiredness only exacerbated.  In seeing it for a second time, that nerve was not quite as exposed, but still there nonetheless.

Bob Harris (Murray) is a middle-aged washed up movie actor being overpaid to promote whiskey in Tokyo, Japan.  He forgets his son’s birthday while his wife FedExes carpet samples to his hotel room.  Charlotte (Johansson) is a college grad who majored in philosophy and now finds herself married to a photographer (Ribisi) and without any idea what to do with her life now that she’s tagged along with him to Tokyo.  Both Bob and Charlotte feel completely alienated by not only Tokyo but their lives, and this is enough of a commonality for them to strike up an unlikely friendship.

Bill Murray is so wonderful in this film, and I remember, at the time, that it was such a BIG FREAKIN’ DEAL in the media.  Everyone, and I do mean everyone, was all “holy F*%@ Bill Murray can actually act and express emotions and everything!”  He was nominated for his one and only Oscar for his role as Bob Harris, but something I’ve been thinking about is that no one should have been THAT surprised.  Frankly, Murray’s filmography for the ten years prior to Lost in Translation was building up to this, a perfectly seriocomic role.  In my opinion, it all starts with Groundhog Day in 1993, then goes on to Ed Wood with Tim Burton in 1994, then most significantly on to Rushmore in 1998 and The Royal Tenenbaums in 2001, both with Wes Anderson.  The fact that Murray was specifically choosing work that defied his early slapstick routines (he also managed to be in a Shakespeare movie before Lost in Translation) was apparent.  Since Lost in Translation, he has continued his relationship with Wes Anderson, becoming in some ways a grand duke of the indie film scene, and has also cultivated a relationship with Jim Jarmusch of all people.  I give Murray all the credit in the world for clearly seeking divergent film roles, because he is just wonderful when he tones down the stupid comedy and allows the sadness to peek through.  I’m not surprised at all that a generation of younger filmmakers have wanted to use him in their work. 

I don’t often write about it on my blog, but back in 2004, I was in a PhD program doing biochemistry research.  I was utterly miserable, but I hadn’t yet realized I was miserable.  (It would take another 18 months for me to finally face the issue and leave the program, moving on to something that DIDN’T take a jackhammer to my sense of self-worth.)  Like Charlotte, I was in my early to mid-twenties and I felt adrift.  And that night that I watched Lost in Translation for the first time, this film was an enormous trigger that managed to convey some of the hopelessness and lack of direction I was drowning in.  Although I still could not completely admit it to myself at the time, now with 20/20 hindsight I have no doubt that the minor breakdown this film gave me was because I identified a bit too much with the emotional message here.  When I watched it just a few days ago, the tears at the end were caused not by a current sense of angst in my life, but of remembrance; recalling just how emotionally draining and numbing those years in the lab were, recalling just how pathetic I felt then, how utterly useless and ineffectual I thought I was because my experiments never worked (not once, not ever, not even the goddamned controls did what they were supposed to do), how much of a failure I thought myself.  Quite frankly, this film isn’t the easiest thing in the world for me to watch, not because it’s bad or horrific, but because it has a way of pulling all those old emotions out to surface. 

Which is definitely a bit of a testament to the film, because I was working in a biochemistry research lab and Charlotte was in Tokyo for a few weeks.  Not exactly the same thing.

It’s very difficult for me to be objective or analytical about this film.  This is a much more subjective experience for me, as I just watch this and feel.  I feel Charlotte’s depression as she tries to tell her friend she doesn’t know who she married only to have the friend blow her off.  I have also had a friend during this time in my life who was a bit like Bob Harris, someone who, although a generation apart from me, I connected with and who I got along extraordinarily well with and who made me forget, albeit for short periods of time, how much sadness I was really hiding.  Although an argument can be made, depending on your frame of mind, that Coppola pushes the relationship between Bob and Charlotte to the brink of sexual tension, and I honestly do not think that I ever had *that* kind of relationship with my friend, I relate yet again to understanding the feeling of respite caused by an unlikely friend. 

This movie.  This movie was my early to mid-twenties.  The deep seated denial that I was sad (I wasn’t supposed to be sad, I was in biochemistry PhD program for crying out loud), the feelings of hopelessness and uselessness that almost consumed me, Lost in Translation brings it out in a beautiful, sadly poignant way.  On the surface, my story is not at all like Charlotte’s, but Sofia Coppola knew what she was doing, knew that her particular story of cultural alienation could really strike far deeper. 

This is not a movie I can watch lightly or “have on in the background.”  I’m in a much better place now than I was ten years ago, but the experience in the lab was a bit emotionally scarring and I still struggle with some of those feelings of loss of self-worth (and I have a feeling I will always feel like something of a failure).  Lost in Translation is a film that reminds me of that phase of my life, for better or for worse, and while it makes me happy to know I’m not there anymore, this movie has a way of reminding me just how painful those years were.

For the record, I think this movie is awesome.  It just strikes a bit too close to home for me to watch it with any regularity.

Arbitrary Rating: 9/10, and apologies if you actually wanted me to talk about the movie rather than whinging on about myself.

Good Bye Lenin!

Good Bye Lenin!

2003

Director: Wolfgang Becker

Starring: Daniel Brühl, Katrin Sass

Of all things, finding a touching, sentimental film about family relationships using the context of East German fascism to get across the point, I was not expecting.  Good Bye Lenin! is exactly that.  It’s a film that could only be made in Germany, as no other country could explain with both such bitterness and such touchingly fond nostalgia what life behind the east side of the Berlin wall was like, all while presenting one of the best filmic examples of mother-son relationships I’ve ever seen.  To put it more bluntly, Good Bye Lenin! caught me by surprise.

Alex Kerner (Brühl) loves his mother (Sass) very much.  Not in a gross, Psycho sort of way, but in a regular little boy sort of way.  After all, his father abandoned them and his sister.  His mother, for her part, takes her husband’s abandonment as motivation to throw herself fully into East German citizenship, becoming a community leader.  When, years later, she sees Alex taking part in a protest against the socialist state, she faints from the shock, has a heart attack, and is plunged into a coma.  Alex is guilt-ridden.  He loves his mother, but he also believes in democracy for Germany.  While his mother is in a coma, the Berlin Wall is torn down and their entire world changes; months later, Mama wakes up, but the doctor warns that the slightest shock could kill her.  Alex decides to recreate a pre-Berlin Wall East Germany for his mother to keep alive her belief in the government that she poured her heart and soul into.

All of this, frankly, makes Alex sound a little crazy.  I won’t deny it; he definitely has a bit of obsession going on.  He plunges headlong into his quest to recreate fascist East Berlin for his mother, rooting around in dumpsters for old food jars, transferring the new, Holland pickles into the old state-produced pickle jar.  He hires young boys to come sing nationalist songs to his bedridden mother.  When his mother starts to discover the capitalist world around her, he makes up extravagant stories about Western refugees, even going so far as to hire his filmmaker friend to stage some news reports so her mother can “verify” his story while watching TV.  Yeah, Alex certainly has a screw loose.  At the same time, what is so refreshing about Alex is that he continues to live his life.  He loves his mother, but he doesn’t tend to her 24-7.  He falls in love with a cute Soviet nurse Lara (Chulpan Khamatova) who is tending to his mother, and, in a rather funny scene, unplugs his mother’s IV because he is ogling Lara’s legs.  He goes to parties and drinks and gets high with his friends.  He gets a job selling satellite systems.  He even went behind his mother’s back to “march for the right to go for walks without the Berlin Wall getting in [the] way.” (one of my favorite quotes from the smart script)  Alex is a very normal young man, with one rather unusual obsession.

I like that Alex is normal.  It makes him very approachable as a character.  He is a good boy, a mother’s boy, but he wants to live his life.  He is tremendously likeable, and that is the key to so much of Good Bye Lenin!’s success for me.  If a doctor told me that one of my parents would die if they received an extreme shock, I’d probably do what I could to keep that from happening.  In that manner, I identify with Alex.  I’m not sure if I’d invent an entire world, but that’s what makes Alex quirky, and what makes the film a gently black comedy.  In essence, it’s very refreshing to see a normal, flawed character have a very strong, very loving relationship with his mother.

  

And yes, let’s talk about his mother.  Too often in films, mothers are idealized to the point of sainthood.  My mother is a wonderful woman, yes, but not a saint.  Blessedly, neither is Sass’ portrayal of Christiane Kerner.  Christiane Kerner is a very good woman, but for crying out loud, she views her life through the lens of East German fascism.  She is a good mother, a strong mother, but one with incredibly narrow vision.  Sass turns in a wonderful performance as a woman who believes in The State, but believes in her family more, and very much loves her son.  What Brühl and Sass turn in is, in my opinion, one of the best filmic examples of a loving mother-son relationship I’ve ever seen.  It is refreshingly flawed, but tremendously honest.

The style of the film feels underdeveloped.  There are some interesting choices made through the film – brief moments of fast forward or slow motion, several references to Stanley Kubrick, surrealistic film sets – but there are, oddly enough, too few of them.  I’m all for a stylized film; I really enjoy a surreal film experience, a world that clearly could not exist in real life, but this film goes halfway there and then gives up.  There’s a lack of commitment with the stylization.  I wish the director had either shot the entire film in a realistic manner or sprinkled a few more strange moments throughout; as it stands, I find the stylized moments jarring and unexpected.  

  

Culturally speaking, Good Bye Lenin! is an interesting look at a moment in German history that rarely gets covered.  When Hollywood thinks “Germany,” they go to Nazis and pretty much stop there.  The fall of the Berlin Wall was also important, yet it doesn’t make as clean and tidy a moral study as does the rise and fall of Hitler.  Good Bye Lenin! manages to convey both the enormity of the upheaval of the fall of the Wall, but also the day-to-day banality of life both before and after the change.  Life is still life, regardless of the presence of the East German state.  It’s fascinating watching the characters change and adapt, and yet stay so very much the same. 

Although it veers frighteningly close to sappy melodramatics, I enjoyed the sentimental nature of the mother-son relationship in Good Bye Lenin!.  And that’s saying quite a bit, because I normally despise sentimental melodrama in all its forms.  However, there is a sense of realism and an honesty to the characters in this film that manages to ground the emotional arc.  Plus, there’s a witticism and subtle comedy to the treatment of the fall of the Berlin Wall that is unexpected. 

Arbitrary Rating: 8/10

The Best of Youth

 

The Best of Youth

2003

Director: Marco Tullio Giordana

Starring: Luigi Lo Cascio, Alessio Boni

Phew.  That’s what I have to say after cannonballing all of this movie in one day.  Why do I say “phew?”  Two reasons.  First of all, the dang thing clocks in at just over six hours.  That’s right, I just sat and watched a six hour movie with minimal breaks.  Why would you subject yourself to that, you may ask.  Good question.  The answer is reason number two: this movie has the capacity to pull you in, emotionally, so emerging from it, I feel as though I am surfacing once more to the real world.  I have been completely engulfed in the world of The Best of Youth for the past day.  Hence “phew.”

The story focuses on the two brothers in the Carati family, Nicola (Lo Cascio) and Matteo (Boni).  Nicola isn’t the best student, but he works hard and is good-natured and dreams of becoming a doctor.  Matteo is a supremely gifted student, but also highly strung with some anger issues.  Right off the bat, we witness Matteo drop out of school and enlist in the army, and later the police force, while Nicola takes off for a backpack trip through Norway on his way to becoming a psychiatrist, an inspiration after he meets a young mental patient Giorgia.  The movie starts in the 1960s and follows the brothers’ lives, the lives of their parents, their two sisters, various love interests, and, ultimately, children, through to 2003, all against the backdrop of recent Italian history.

The Barbarian Invasions

The Barbarian Invasions
2003
Director: Denys Arcand
Starring: Rémy Girard, Stéphane Rousseau, Marie-Josée Croze

This was a shockingly personal film for me. As such, expect a shockingly personal review, one that I will not advertise as readily as nearly all of my other work.

In The Barbarian Invasions, Best Foreign Language Film Oscar winner from 2003, retired professor Remy (Girard) is diagnosed with inoperable and terminal cancer in Montreal. His ex-wife calls their estranged son Sebastien (Rousseau) and his fiancée back from London where he works as a financial planner. He is hesitant, having been estranged from his father for a long time, but at the insistence of his mother, he fights the broken health care system to provide comfortable final days for his father. He gets his dad a better room, calls together his father’s old friends, and even goes to the lengths of scoring heroin from a junkie (Croze) to help relieve his father’s pain.

Superficially, The Barbarian Invasions seems to pride itself on how “risqué” it is. ‘Look at Remy! He admits to having had multiple mistresses! Look at his friends! They’re in their fifties and talking about socialism and sex! OMG, Remy is doing drugs!!!! Is your mind blown yet?!?!?’ Yes yes yes, you’re quite shocking. There was a pomposity to this, a feeling of blustery “WOW we’re in an awesome movie because this is so TABOO!” Ostentatious and stagey; these are the adjectives I would use, not taboo.