Review of Lost in Translation (2003) by Halfwelshman — 21 Jul 2012

Lost in Translation is thoroughly disappointing. It appears to be pretty much universally praised, yet it's a flawed film. I'll concede that it's beautifully filmed, that Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson give great performances and that the relationship between their two characters is sweet and endearing, as a tale of two lost souls finding a connection is always compelling.

Despite these positives, the film puts forward an extremely patronising, stereotypical and borderline racist view of Japanese culture. By depicting a steady procession of carefully cherry-picked Japanese "oddities", it's almost like the film's main objective is to say "hey, come laugh at the silly Japanese, they're not like Americans at all".

A recurring joke in the film is the mockery of Japanese speech pattern of the replacement of the letter r with the letter l. This gag is barely funny the first time it is used, but it is reprised four or five times throughout the film.

In one of the key "comedy" scenes, Murray's character struggles to understand a heavily accented Japanese director during a photo shoot, and his mimicry of the poor man's voice to decipher each instruction isn't funny, just embarrassing, akin to the lack of logic behind an English-speaking tourist abroad raising his voice to make themselves understood to non-English speakers.

To make matters even worse, the film is all-too-often slow or just plain boring. Beyond great chemistry between Murray and Johansson and striking aesthetics, the appeal of Lost in Translation is, well, lost in translation chiefly thanks to some criminal cultural insensitivity that really shouldn't be applauded in the modern world.