The New Yorker & Me: David Denby on Sofia Coppola's "Lost in Translation"

Introduction

What is The New Yorker? I know it’s a great magazine and that it’s a tremendous source of pleasure in my life. But what exactly is it? This blog’s premise is that The New Yorker is a work of art, as worthy of comment and analysis as, say, Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn.” Each week I review one or more aspects of the magazine’s latest issue. I suppose it’s possible to describe and analyze an entire issue, but I prefer to keep my reviews brief, and so I usually focus on just one or two pieces, to explore in each the signature style of its author. A piece by Nick Paumgarten is not like a piece by Jill Lepore, and neither is like a piece by Ian Frazier. One could not mistake Collins for Seabrook, or Bilger for Goldfield, or Mogelson for Kolbert. Each has found a style, and it is that style that I respond to as I read, and want to understand and describe.

Sunday, January 23, 2022

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.