PW (Parallel World) 2: Lost in Translation (with one difference)

And the people who think the Scarlett 'Lost in Translation' is problematical actually enjoy the Hiromix remix a lot more. Because positive stereotyping (and I'm assuming that would play a part) is a step up from negative stereotyping, even if there is a certain appeal to our desire for exoticism and idealisation of the other. (It's not as if cinema isn't actually rather good at those things. Travelogue is one of the reasons we sit in the dark room. To see the other, the elsewehere, and marvel.)

But tell me what you think the voices would be saying, on our very own meta-Metacritic.

‘Love Actually’. A vision of a society dancing on a volcano. Makes sense if you imagine that London is hit by a nuclear strike just after the end credits. ‘Love Actually’ is part of a trilogy: the reason it’s so sentimental is because it’s a ‘La Jetee’ style look at London through the eyes of one of the survivors (the ending has deliberate echoes of ‘Twelve Monkeys’). The second part is like ‘Time of the Wolf’ with Emma Thompson as Isabelle Huppert and Rowan Atkinson in the Olivier Gourmet role. In the third, ‘Kill Billy Bob’, our time-traveller has to assassinate most of the cast, but especially Hugh Grant, in order to prevent the tragedy from (re)-occurring.

She's in her early 20s, Bob's in his 50s. This is the classic set-up for a May-November romance, since in the mathematics of celebrity intergenerational dating you can take five years off the man's age for every million dollars of income.

Now, in our parallel world version we have to find a parallel equasion in which 'intergenerational' is morphed into 'interracial' and the characters are equalised. (We want them to be equal, don't we?) So, what is that formula? Does Woody get five years knocked off for being American? Ten years added on? How does it work? Can we find a way to be more comfortable with the culture gap, or do we always want to narrow it?

You seem to be looking for problems/stigmas here where no-one else can find them.

Disingenuous, surely. Just how foreign are 'coalition of the willing' nations, especially when they share racial groups and languages, and when one of them gets to define norms worldwide?

One of the most interesting questions the Coppola film threw up for me -- it was the scene in the Tokyo hospital where Murray mimics the Japanese woman's incomprehensibility -- is whether it's possible to be American and foreign, when you're in an American film, no matter where it's set? Because, no matter what foreign place Murray is in, he's essentially always amongst friends -- us, the viewers. And he plays to the gallery in that slightly less courteous way that people do when they're with friends, amongst strangers.

Can Murray be alone, in a film? And can he be foreign in a film? Could the movie actually show us Murray getting 'less American'? (There's one small attempt: he tells his wife on the phone that he wants to eat more healthy food in the future. More Japanese food.)

The writer-director is also smart enough to pepper her screenplay with comic set-pieces in which Woody Allen can cut loose. Photo shoots, TV sets, hospital waiting rooms, golf courses and hotel gyms serve as backdrops against which Woody displays his comic genius. These crowd-pleasing moments fuel the audience’s affection for the character (even if they occasionally make Japan in this film the fall guy the way the future was in Woody's own 'Sleeper'), so we’re deeply emotionally involved when, understandably, he begins to lose his heart to the delectable Hiromix. Republic Magazine, a parallel world publication

This covers the age "dilemma" more, but: If there's a difference of more than a few years between the couple (man/woman, or whatever) red flags go up in the American psyche. (As Woody is schtupping his own stepdaughter, he's an extreme example). In general, it's hard for Americans to believe the couple concerned would get together for any other reason than cold, hard cash. Personally speaking, I think it's up to the couple to find their peace with the culture gap. Who cares about what others think?

I think you're being a little hard on Americans. When Fast Company magazine ran a piece that panned Apple for not making more profit, a lot of Americans wrote in to say that cold hard cash was not the sole meaning of life:

http://www.fastcompany.com/soundoff/reader_comment.html?cid=12818

http://www.fastcompany.com/soundoff/reader_comment.html?cid=12836

The point being that your objections to the unjapanizishness of LiT and the presentation of an alternate reality really smacks of a patronizing British colonizer taking it upon himself to being civilization to the coloreds.

The movie is not about Japan, it's about Sofia Coppola.

http://www.iheartny.com/yourenotthere/handt/6momus.GIF

Was born and bred in America, monsieur. And I'd be the first to agree that cash isn't the sole reason for living....but it I'm realistic to see that it makes the ride slightly easier.

I'm fine with being white, but I don't think we whiteys necessarily have to stick up for each other and hunt in packs.

Pardon while I shake with laughter at that slice of truth. (And if you've met me, you know why I laugh!)

[Can you send me the link to your site, BTW? I'm redoing my bookmarks and I lost it.]

My little empire of Me.

B-B-but I thought that your songs were all about you? I'm so disillusioned.

It's be more interesting, to me, were the girl in such a parallel film neither native nor of the same nationality as the man - make her German! make her Chinese! Have them both 'stranded' together: does that affect the film? I haven't got the sense that 'Japan' is important to the film, except as a backdrop of Foreign Place which forces two characters together.

(nb: I have not seen Lost in Translation, nor do I want to.)

Yeah, the risk is that no-one wants to sit through 'Madame Butterfly' these days. It isn't 1900, and the neo-colonial age doesn't tend to romanticise new arrivals into its empire. Shall we hold our breath waiting for the Broadway musical about the romance between the American GI and the pretty Bagdhad girl?

It would be interesting to see it with Araki in the Murray role and Hiromix in the Johansson role.

And set in Dallas, Texas.

That phrase came back to me as I flipped through the new edition of Studio Voice magazine and saw some images of Alice Liddell and other children photographed by Lewis Carroll in poses in which beauty and sexuality really cannot be completely separated. The phrase came back this time as 'The only thing worse than seeing the sexual beauty in children is not seeing it.' And it reminds me of something that came out of the Michael Jackson thread recently, which is that we are made extremely uneasy by difference, especially difference which does not seem to converge over time into sameness (as when children slowly become adults and foreigners lose their unique customs and start dressing and thinking pretty much like us).

'Lost in Translation', from the title and the situation on down, could have been a speculation on difference in the style Chris Marker's 'Sans Soleil' (in fact critic Sukhdev Sandhu compared it to that film, with insane generosity I think, in the review Radio 3's Night Waves gave it last week... the review is 36.40 minutes in). It isn't. I think it isn't even trying. Sukdhev's other comparison -- with David Lean's 'Brief Encounter' -- is much more apt. He makes the point that 'cool' in Coppola's film replaces 'reserve' in Lean's.

aren't there bigger fish to fry than imagined bugbears?

actually, a lot of this thread is reprised from things said on that thread.

i havent' seen the film so i don't know whether it can be held responsible for celebrating this reality or simply making do with it.

But I don't think that's as problematic as you do, and here's why. The movie as it is is something of a desert-island story, insofar as there's some sense that the two of them are "stranded" together. Your reversal points out that they're not stranded -- they're stranded only insofar as they don't consider the Japanese around them people they can easily relate to. But I think that's in the film, too: they're stranded by their own laziness, or at least tiredness, and not by culture. There are other Americans around -- the businessmen, the lounge singer, the actress, Scarlett's own husband! -- but none of them are deemed any better-to-know than the surrounding Japanese, and in fact they get less effort put into knowing them than Scarlett's Japanese friends do. (Two sort of memorable scenes include Murray in really effortful attempts to connect with the Japanese -- he talks to the one guy in French, and of course there's that terrific hospital scene where the old woman talks to him, which was wonderful in part because the observational-humor thing drops entirely away, and the two women at the edge of the frame are laughing, and the whole thing's sort of beautiful. . .)

In any case. If you want to read metaphors here I think the Japanese setting is just a way of deepening the two characters' sense of displacement from everybody; if you think about their dealings with people of their own culture, there's not really much evidence that they'd feel any more "connected" at home than they do in their hotel in Japan. If there's an issue here it's not race but a general snobbery, this sense of weariness with just about everybody and a sort of laziness in getting past it. Scarlett's own husband says it to her: why do you have to point out that everyone's stupid? And the film seems to side with her on that issue, but I think he's got something of a point.

The problem is that while the audience is meant to laugh at the main characters' confusion in Japan, we end up laughing at the Japanese themselves. But this is a problem with execution rather than intention. (I actually think it's *funnier* the more aware you are of Japanese culture - for instance Murray's confusion at how long it takes to say certain things in Japanese is much funnier if you can actually speak a bit of Japanese. Similarly my Japanese friend Mie loved the film to death because she's been witness or a party to so many such incidents of misunderstanding/miscommunication - though I wouldn't cite her enjoyment of the film as authoritative.