Streaming Diaries, Vol. 1: Envying the Beauty of Strangers in Lost in Translation

I don’t remember the last time I had a conversation with a stranger. Am I the only person that misses such an activity? I’m sure everyone, including I, misses in-person interaction with their friends, colleagues, significant others, etc. But there’s a rush I itch for that only comes when you talk to a stranger. The slight discomfort but total devotion; if you’re talking to a stranger, chances are you’ve willed yourself into the interaction, so you’re interested in its contents. We’re not talking about the instance where the crazy guy under the bridge holding a slab of cardboard over his nether region begins to scream in your direction. That’s not a conversation. He’s just talking at you. You have no obligation to attend to his laments. Avoid.

Is that weird? No, not the guy. That I – sitting in quarantine at my desk upstairs, my entire immediate family sitting downstairs having their pre-dinner wine, fully accessible and adamantly willing to converse – long to meet a stranger to have a chat? Just for a change of pace. Not because I don’t love my family or my virtually reachable friends. Not because I’m sick of my girlfriend – she’s in New Jersey, and our Facetime chats are a delight – but because, especially now, I need less familiarity than ever. 

Typically, I’m a person who appreciates and thrives in familiarity. Same people, same routine, often the same breakfast, some rotation of outfits. I’m as comfortable in the same light blue hoodie every other day as Simon Cowell is with showing his chest hair. So it’s certainly odd for me to actually wish I could talk to a stranger. Again, I don’t know if that’s weird or not. I guess a quarantine is the perfect time for me to wonder aloud about such a dilemma, or at least for the first 305 words of a column that’s supposed to be about one of the most brilliant pieces of art to ever grace a screen. Okay, 329 words.

I am, of course, talking about Sophia Coppola’s wonderful and visceral Lost in Translation. I chose it as the first installment in this new series – I hope “Streaming Diaries” is an okay title, editors – because it made me feel normal for feeling how I felt about strangers. In fact, it made me grumble a bit more about my circumstances. My privileged, perfectly satisfactory circumstances in which I’m holed up in my nice, comfortable home with a stack of books calling my name and three of my closest friends (mom, dad, brother) regularly proximate. They shouldn’t warrant grumbling, but hell, everyone needs the sporadic insertion of bit of novelty. Coppola’s finest feature is a film all about novelty, but more so about how its finest forms can often be found in the simplest places.

Bob Harris (the best Bill Murray has ever been) and Charlotte (my favorite Scarlett Johansson performance, save for Marriage Story) almost immediately foster a connection; the gift we’re given is the ability to watch it evolve from an obstinate glance to an enviable relationship. Bob is a famous actor on business in Tokyo; he’s the begrudging star of a series of whiskey ads. Charlotte’s husband John (Giovanni Ribisi) is a photographer on assignment, also in Tokyo, and Charlotte is evidently tiring of what looks from afar like a wasted relationship. 

They first meet at a bar in the hotel they’re both staying in; they’re clearly comfortable talking to strangers, or at least Charlotte is, as long as the stranger is a movie star. “So what are you doing here?” she asks, not even introducing herself, behaving as though this is a relationship that was pre existing and just needed a jolt. This inquisition, evidently and I suppose, would be that jolt, were their relationship actually preexisting. But it’s not, so Bob responds: “A couple of things. Taking a break from my wife, forgetting my son’s birthday, and, uh, getting paid two million dollars to endorse a whiskey when I could be doing a play somewhere.” You can tell Bob is a tired man who would love to just sleep it off, but every proverbial slumber feels like an unsuccessful nap in the car. He’s always about to fall asleep when the driver runs over a pothole.

Charlotte, as mentioned, is so clearly exhausted from her own life and relationship that any sort of escape is a welcome one. A five-minute chat with a stranger she acts (and feels) like she knows at the bar; a cab ride where she gets to glance out the window at street lights and people ambling frantically (gosh, remember people watching? Remember taxis?). These are the simplest pleasures – the simplest places – in which one can discover solace. 

But the two are never quite themselves, we come to find, without one another. It soon seems as though when Bob is around, Charlotte’s shell dissipates, and vice versa. Well, even that seems unfair to write. Charlotte nor Bob is burdening a shell because she or he wishes to. It seems to have been willed to them by their inadvertent handicaps. They’re two souls stuck in the current that life tries to get you to follow; the shells are meant to combat that. The only two people that can even begin to understand? Take a guess.

What Coppola inspects so delicately in Lost in Translation is her character’s willingness to resign themselves to the fact that they are perhaps “lost souls” by viewing their “condition” in a way in which it almost, if only for a minute, appears to be nonexistent. The late-great Roger Ebert wrote briefly in his review about one of the film’s elements being akin to Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage, a film about a couple who “found themselves ‘in the middle of the night in a dark house somewhere in the world.’ That’s how Bob and Charlotte seem to me,” he said. “Most of the time nobody knows where they are, or cares, and their togetherness is all that keeps them both from being lost and alone. They go to karaoke bars and drug parties, pachinko parlors and, again and again, the hotel bar. They wander Tokyo, an alien metropolis to which they lack the key.” God, what I’d give for a key right about now. Let me out, damn it.

Ebert finally goes on to another superb film, Richard Linklater’s Before Sunrise, noting that Charlotte and Bob “don’t talk in the long literate sentences of [Jesse and Celine], but in the weary understatements of those who don’t have the answers.” For much of the film, we’re subject to the same lack of answers. Bob speaks with his wife twice on the phone – she sends a number of faxes, too, that seem passive at a glance, but could perhaps be genuine and just tonally distorted by distance and the lack of personal touch that goes into a fax – but she seems even further away than Japan is from home. Why? What happened? Same goes for Charlotte: frankly, why is she with John? What does she want to be? Better yet, who?

It’s her connection with Bob that helps us see a little bit past her reserved exterior and, once again, vice versa. Without one, you’re a bit less interested in the other; without one, there almost can’t be another. Those less inclined to parse Coppola’s narrative mastery bit by bit might spend the film wondering whether or not these two crazy kids might get together. But it’s not about that – “They share something as personal as their feelings rather than something as generic as their genitals,” Ebert wrote. It’s nice that seemingly the only other person in a hustling world willing to share their feelings explicitly and honestly is staying in the same hotel.

And it was nice to revisit this amidst a national pandemic. Then, it served as a beautiful, secretive nature of a film all about wielding your secrets to the best possible person willing to indulge. Now, it serves as something still wholly beautiful and deftly penned by someone who’d quickly become a master in her own right, not just by way of her lineage, but also a reminder of what beauty lies beyond the wall initially placed between you and a stranger. Sure, they might not engage nor have any interest in reciprocating your interest in having a chat. It might even be uncomfortable at first, attempting to initiate and nurture a relationship with someone without even knowing their name. 

But I don’t know that anything is as uncomfortable as loneliness. I can guarantee we’re all feeling that in some form right about now. Of course, I don’t need my interaction with this unknown person to evolve into the relationship Charlotte and Bob come to have, speaking with one another as though they were old college roommates or at least old flames from the moment they meet until the moment they depart in the film’s final moments. I just need the interaction. We can stand across the street from each other. Tell me something.