“What you miss in “Marie Antoinette” — and in “Lost in Translation,” for that matter — is the burning human urgency and aesthetic wit Coppola brought to 1999’s “The Virgin Suicides,” her first and still her best movie.”
This quote, read in a review of Marie Antoinette (which I have not seen) made me want to write about Lost in Translation. Another quote “Sometimes Marie Antoinette feels like a knowing knock on tourism (let’s make a movie about the French with American accents!), and a more intentional jab at American cluelessness than Lost in Translation, which for all its prettiness reduced Tokyo to a sideshow.” also felt like it needed a response.
Now, not that the reviewer, Wesley Morris if you care, will read this, but I would guess he hasn’t been to Tokyo, and if he has, he was there only briefly and as a tourist. He didn’t live/work/become lost there as I have, and as the characters have. If you ever live in Tokyo, you won’t be able to adequately describe how the white noise becomes so engulfing of your whole person. How you start to feel like you are living underwater. Something about being so foreign, in a country where there are so many people, and where there is no personal space but infinite emotional space, where you could be in a crowd of people with no one really seeing you, eats away at your sense of self. I felt this movie captured that feeling, a feeling I hadn’t even tried to put in words. And while Mr. Morris felt like it was lacking in burning human urgency, I would argue that it was, but it was dulled by the constant buzz and underwater feeling that Tokyo can surround someone in.
Sofia Coppola seems to distance herself from her movie subjects, in ‘Virgin Suicides’ the whole tale is told by the boys next door, so even if Mr. Morris felt ‘burning urgency’ it was still filtered. In ‘Lost in Translation’ the characters are older, the humanity that she depicts is less hormonal and therefore both more real and poignant. But still it is filtered, this time through Tokyo.
As for his other comment, the ‘aesthetic wit’, ironically, I don’t see it in the ‘Virgin Suicides’ as much as in ‘Lost in Translation.’ Every shot of Tokyo was one that I understood - the shots that also resonated in my mind after my stint there. The crowds juxtapositioned with the lonely hotel rooms, the mix of long shots with closeups reflecting the brief moments of the characters’ connection - as if two people find each other while both lost in the sea.
more later . . . .
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