David Denby on Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation"

Photo from Erin Overbey's "Sunday Reading: A Cultural Review of the Aughts"

Erin Overbey, in her “Sunday Reading: A Cultural Review of the Aughts” (newyorker.com, January 23, 2022), provides “a selection of pieces—a culture review, of sorts—that capture the creative pulse of the early two-thousands.” It’s a wonderful collection that, for me, brings back many pleasurable memories. Included in her collection is David Denby’s brilliant “Heart Break Hotels” (The New Yorker, September 15, 2003), a review of two movies – Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation and Stephen Frears’s Dirty Pretty Things. Lost in Translation is my all-time favourite film. Denby’s piece is an excellent appreciation of it. He writes,

Coppola doesn’t punch up her scenes; she’s not interested in tension leading to a climax but in moods and states of being. She’s willing to let an awkward silence sit on the screen. Not much happens, but Coppola is so gentle and witty an observer that the movie casts a spell. 

It does indeed. For me, the essence of that spell is the exquisite melancholy of obstructed desire. Denby gets at this when he says of the film’s two main characters, played superbly by Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, “The relationship is perched on the edge of eros.” I don’t know of any other movie that explores that edge so tenderly, beautifully, and perceptively.