Sofia Coppola's Tokyo film. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson, a hotel bar at 3am, and the most-quoted whisper in 2000s cinema.
Tokyo. Bob Harris, a faded American film star in his fifties, is in Japan to shoot a series of whiskey commercials for $2m. Charlotte, a young American woman in her early twenties, is in Tokyo accompanying her photographer husband on a work trip. Both are jet-lagged. Both are emotionally adrift from their respective marriages. They meet at the Park Hyatt Tokyo's hotel bar. They spend roughly a week together — meals, karaoke, late-night conversations, one excursion to a Buddhist temple — and form a quiet, non-romantic connection that the film refuses to make literal.
The film closes on Bob and Charlotte saying goodbye on a Tokyo street. Bob whispers something in Charlotte's ear that the audience cannot hear. They embrace. Bob's car drives away. The film has, by audience consensus, the most-discussed unheard whisper in modern American cinema.
Lost in Translation was Sofia Coppola's second feature after The Virgin Suicides (1999). The film was made for approximately $4m and grossed $118m worldwide. It won Coppola the Best Original Screenplay Oscar at the 2004 ceremony and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor (Murray).
What the film did for Bill Murray was significant. Murray had spent the 1980s and 1990s as a comedy star (Stripes, Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day, Caddyshack); his 1998 work with Wes Anderson (Rushmore) had begun his pivot into serious dramatic acting. Lost in Translation is the role that completed the pivot. Murray's lead performance is one of the most-quoted dramatic-comedy performances of the early 2000s — Bob's exhaustion, his small comic asides delivered to a hostile camera crew, his moments of quiet attention to Charlotte.
Lost in Translation has been criticised, fairly, for the way it depicts Tokyo. The Japanese characters are largely played for comic relief; the city's specific cultural texture is treated as exotic backdrop rather than examined; the protagonists' alienation is structurally framed as Tokyo's fault rather than as their own.
Coppola's defence is that the film is told from the protagonists' specific perspective — two jet-lagged Americans whose understanding of Tokyo is, accurately, that of disoriented visitors who don't speak the language. The argument is that the film is honest to its protagonists' experience, not that the protagonists are right. Both readings have textual support. The film is one of the most-discussed examples of the contemporary argument about cultural representation in mainstream American cinema.
The final scene's unheard whisper has generated approximately a quarter-century of audience speculation. The choice was Coppola's. The whispered line was reportedly improvised by Murray during the shoot. Coppola has said in subsequent interviews that she has the audio recording of what was said but will not release it.
What the choice does is refuse to resolve what Bob and Charlotte's connection actually was. The audience is not allowed to know whether his whisper is a confession of love, an instruction, a piece of personal advice, a goodbye. The relationship between Bob and Charlotte — which has been left deliberately undefined throughout the film — is also left undefined at its end. Some audiences find this maddening. Others consider it the film's specific achievement: the refusal to flatten an ambiguous human connection into a resolvable category.