Introduction
The notion of ‘getting lost’ is the occurrence of an individual losing their spatial reference, which consists of two elements: the feeling of disorientation and a spatial environment. The feeling of getting lost constitutes part of the human experience of day-to-day life. In A Field Guide of Getting Lost, Solnit thinks the meaning of getting lost extends into the realm of emotions, identity, and existential discovery.[1] This sudden sense of uncertainty, disconnection, and alienation shapes our individual consciousness and perception of the physical environment and mental state. This deconstruction and pursuit of identity is familiar to what travelers feel about being out of place in a foreign locale, bustled by disorientation in geography and the strangeness of cultural perceptions.
In the nocturnal domain of urban landscapes, ‘getting lost’ takes on new dimensions as cities are covered in darkness, and conventional way-finding ways, both physically and mentally, are blurred or erased. This intersection of nighttime urban environments and the tourist experience of disorientation forms the essential storytelling in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation (2003), with the two juxtaposing characters ‘lost’ as drifting in a foreign land and needing ‘translation’ to seek meanings and make sense not only of language but also of their individualities. Through how the characters and plot are built up and sophisticated cinematography techniques, Coppola establishes a unique language that translates the complexities of urban night and its impact on the cinematic experience of getting lost.
In this essay, a formal analysis of the film is conducted from three major perspectives. First, the interior spaces where the majority of scenes are placed, the hotel, collectively draws a picture of the city’s nighttime urban landscape for sleeplessness and insomnia. Secondly, how the night Tokyo becomes a third role that contributes to the film’s overall atmospheric ambiance, which exists not just in the temporal night but also protrudes into the daytime. Lastly, the cultural representation of Japan and how the cross-cultural encounters become drivers for deconstructing the nighttime aesthetics of the film.
Hotel, Lost in Insomnia
In Lost in Translation, the film deliberately pivots from this concept by setting two characters who are American tourists in Japan, totally ignorant about Japanese culture. Meanwhile, Tokyo, the foreign city they abruptly arrive at, becomes a blurry puzzle they need to gather together rapidly in their short stay. The passage of time is a symbol that can be traced throughout the storytelling of the film, and the sense of temporality is encapsulated since the start of Bob and Charlotte’s relationship. However, the audience is often left with the confusion of the pace of time passing, as there is a prominent sense of blurred boundaries between day and night throughout their brief encounter. In Coppola’s lens, the first image of Tokyo as a city of insomnia is illustrated as the protagonists lose the conventional sense of time in the space they inhabit, the hotel.
The film opens with Bob, a middle-aged famous American actor and celebrity, arriving in Tokyo to shoot a whiskey commercial. While in the hotel where he was accommodated, he meets Charlotte, a young recent graduate student, accompanying her husband to stay in Tokyo for a week for his photo shooting projects. With the majority of their encounters happening in the hotel, interior spaces in Park Hyatt Tokyo shape our initial understanding of the experience of landing in foreign Japan. The homogenous and standardized space of the hotel, which is muted with minimum symbols of individuality, establishes a claustrophobic experience where the characters are stuck in the hotel time instead of in real-time. Sensations of enclosure and airlessness are realized by situating the characters in oppressive interior space. On the first night when Bob arrives in Tokyo, he separates from his colleagues and is finally alone by himself, the camera draws attention to him standing in the elevator going up to his suite. With exhaustion from jetlag and efforts to maintain his public persona, in the elevator, a shot shows him surrounded by Asian men wearing the same business suits with similar expressions on their faces (see fig.1). The stereotypical Asian working-class appearance is absurdly exaggerated in this scene, and the contrast of Bob as the tall white male standing in the middle suddenly speaks about his aloneness and disconnection with his physical context. The appearance of the crowd wearing business suits in this late night challenges the visual image of the Western meaning of hotels representing after-hour leisure and entertainment, which as a result challenges both the character and audience’s perception of time.
The familiar physical setting and the interior finishes of the hotel also deceive the passage of time. Even if the audience has not stayed at the Park Hyatt, they can recognize the typical components – lobby, bar, pool, rooms. Here, Coppola chooses to depict different yet juxtaposing experiences of Bob and Charlotte through visual images. As a young female left alone by her husband during the day, Charlotte autonomously scatters her personal traces across her room (see fig.2); she immediately starts building a chaotic and disorderly identity in her intimate space. The camera is frequently towards the hotel window, with the cityscape of Tokyo always as a backdrop of Charlotte’s daily wandering in her room, and her room is filled with randomness and boredom, in contrast with the vast yet distant vision of Tokyo cityscape. Charlotte’s time is frozen, and we see it more prominently through the reappearing shots of her sitting alone by the hotel window looking down into the city (see fig. 3), which is always gloomy and dark with no suggestion of time in a day. Meanwhile, Bob’s space has an altered visual expression. Bob is provided with a vast amount of space as a celebrity being accommodated in this hotel. His room is even too big to be filled with, and Bob keeps his distance to start occupying this room. What fills his room are luxury interior decorations and heavily used textures and materials (see fig. 4), which create a private luxurious experience yet also enclose the guests into an illusional bubble. Bob’s time is unseen. He is stuck in the dark yet excessive indoor labyrinth of the hotel, and the camera tends to capture his figure in a perspective configuration suggesting the endlessness of the physical space. In the hotel lounge bar (see fig. 5) and the hallway (see fig. 6), Bob seems stuck in the repetition of hotel interiors and cannot find a way out.
Ultimately, the interior space of the hotel blurs the sense of time and situates the characters in jet-lagged insomnia, where the characters are both physically and emotionally unable to find rest. The hotel interiors are a symbolized context of disorientation and alienation felt by the protagonists, with the film's portrayal of the hotel as a claustrophobic and timeless environment reflecting the characters' struggles to connect with their surroundings and find a sense of belonging, which serves as a metaphor for the broader themes of lost and existential uncertainty explored throughout the film.
Nights that Invade Days
As the film is clearly paced with a chronological order alongside Bob and Charlotte spending every single day and each day passing marks them getting closer to the day of separation, the audience is well aware that they are meant to separate eventually. However, the ambiguity of the passage of time creates an everlasting sensation that the night never passes. In Lost in Translation, the notion of night goes beyond the temporal definition, rather, night becomes a mood or a thematic character that expands into the entire film. One of the techniques to achieve this effect is using the atmospheric ambiance that resembles night also for the day scenes, which essentially makes the days become nights.
After establishing the perpetual sensation of night, the film employs lighting as one of the crucial elements to further enhance this thematic portrayal. According to Geoff and Bottà, the night is an “additive to the engine of production”[2], and only with the invention of electricity and illumination can a city in the night become an inhabitable space that does not shut down after conventional off hours. Among the cities notable for its night scenes, Tokyo is famous for its bustling nightlife with colorful lighting, glaring signage, and superficial pop culture. In Cities of Light (2015), the illumination design in Tokyo, using Skytree as an example, is described as “announcing and imparting a message, a new network, and pathway for the interaction between time, place and viewer[3]”. Similar motifs are explored in Lost in Translation, as lighting is strategically utilized to immerse the audience in an emotional journey through the urban landscape of Tokyo. Minimum artificial lighting is used in the night scenes and the background is always lit with environmental lights out of focus. When Charlotte first reaches out to start a conversation with Bob in the hotel lounge (see fig. 7), the long-lens camera captures an angle as the viewers are on the other side of their bar table, observing them at eye-level perspective. Charlotte and Bob are located on two sides of the frame in a symmetrical configuration, and with the close focus on their upper bodies, there is the city at night out of focus with lens flares of red and blue neon blobs in the background. In the next sequence when they have a night out, Charlotte and Bob get on the street to escape into a cab (see fig. 8). Here, the director switches back to the favored shallow planes and long lenses, with the two’s surrounding context blurred out. The distinct visual style and color schemes of night Tokyo resonate with the framing of the hotel lounge scene (see fig. 7), while the red is exaggerated by the car lights, and cold blue occupies the streetscape. The choice of color temperature in these night scenes, with cool tones dominating the visual palette and warm spots shining, is a consistent visual language that is seen in day scenes. In the key ending scene when Bob and Charlotte are saying goodbye on a Shibuya street (see fig. 9), the street is cast in cool shadows that exaggerate the vivid red lighting on street banners; A similar color scheme is also employed in a seemingly random shot of the city by the highway (see fig. 10), on the way Bob is leaving Tokyo for the airport. The flashing-neon/light quality figures consistently throughout the film become one of the signifiers of “Tokyo-ness”[4], which gives a muted quality that reduces the flashiness of the visuals and adds an extra layer of nocturnal aesthetic to the film.
Night scenes in films are intentionally made blurry at times to evoke a sense of realism and atmosphere. This blurriness mimics the natural effect of low light conditions, where details become less defined and shapes blend into the surroundings. By adding this blur, filmmakers create a mood of mystery and tension, enhancing the viewer's immersion in the scene. Additionally, blurriness can also be used stylistically to convey a character's state of mind or emotions. A distinct blurring effect achieved by the handheld camera constitutes another aesthetics of Lost in Translation, particularly when the characters are in moments of greater freedom, both separately and when shared, while the city at night provides them a hope to flee from domestic responsibilities and personas. In the scene when Charlotte and Bob’s group of friends get in trouble and start a BB-gun fight on the street, Charlotte guides Bob fleeing into the labyrinth of Japanese arcade halls (see fig. 11); the hand-held camera shoots the two at their backs while Charlotte dominates Bob past along the endless aisle of gaming machines, getting lost into the unknown domain of the city. Hand-held camerawork evokes a greater sense of freedom and an urge to escape, which is a consistent visual style used in this sequence (see fig. 12). The impression created here is of a certain kind of objectivity, an objective form of verisimilitude inherited in the distance created between the character and the camera.[5] The distinct style of the hand-held camera creates the ‘wipe’ effect when the camera is obscured between the discrepancy of camera movement and the character’s movement. At Bob’s “arch” moment when he for the first time gets out on Tokyo’s street (see fig. 13), the same effect is employed again in this day scene. Handhold camera is not merely an aesthetic choice during production, according to Coppola, the crew had to overcome difficulties such as location shooting without permits and low budgeting, which led to the improvised freeform manner of shooting Tokyo with spontaneous informality.[6] Tokyo is shot with a spontaneous informality, where King commented that the lightweight and flexible ‘guerrilla style’ that combines the practical limitations with creative expressions is well suited to the storytelling of this film.[7]
Is This Tokyo Real?
If you ask whether the characters in Lost in Translation have revealed authentic Japanese people and culture, the answer is probably in denial. The role of Tokyo, Japan, and the Japanese largely serves as a backdrop against which to set the situations and the developing relationship between the two central characters. There is a certain kind of objectivity that also sets the distance between the characters and the real Tokyo, achieved by both the visual style as discussed above and the embedded Western ideology as part of the Orientalist discourses. The key to understanding an Orientalist discourse of this kind is that it tells us more about its source than it does about the overseas territories to which it is meant to refer.[8] As Littlewood stated, the Western stereotyping of Japanese culture is about the notion of paradox and contradiction, the “inherent peculiarity” is a product of ‘our own angle of vision’.[9] Lost in Translation, hereby, is particularly complicit in this notion as it intentionally sets the characters in ignorance of their physical surroundings and shows them with a shallow understanding in perceiving Tokyo. The city is structurally located as ‘other’ to them.[10] Throughout the film, the distance between the characters and their context is captured in numerous formats and settings. For example, it shows several scenes of Charlotte traveling alone with multiple symbols of isolation, such as headphones and train windows that separate her from the outer world (see fig. 14). In another scene of her aimless wandering in the city, she observes the ‘absurd’ Japanese youth playing gaming machines in the arcade hall (see fig. 15). In Bob’s side of the story, he spent an unsettling night being unwillingly required by his agent to attend a Japanese late-night TV show, being forced to act in his celebrity persona, and feeling uncomfortable in this encounter (see fig. 16).
Among these scenes, the real Tokyo is either far away or depicted as an uncomfortable or strange place to experience. Thus, Tokyo is not a city that the film intends to depict, rather, it is the ‘Tokyo-ness’ that is deployed as a tool to push the characters inwardly in their deeply rooted Western ideologies. Tokyo is not a destination that is unique to a story like this, rather, an identical story can happen in any place in the world as long as the domestic culture falls in the Western stereotyping scope. In other words, the characters feel lost as they choose to immerse themselves in this mood of ‘lost’, which successfully aligns with the nighttime aesthetic that is discussed above. Together, the depiction of Tokyo in the narrative of Lost in Translation does not intend to construct the real city but rather a fragmented image of a reel city.[11] Tokyo becomes a mental city made by the medium of cinema.
Conclusion
In conclusion, Lost in Translation explicitly engages the most apparent themes of loneliness, disconnection, and isolation, and numerous references to its cinematic techniques have been made in this essay. The lack of a narrative ‘action’ in its loose plot and the ‘loss’ or aimlessness experienced by watching this film, is signified in the visual image of Charlotte sitting by the hotel window or her undirected scrolling on the street, with the jet-lagged Tokyo experiences of Bob and her together, out of time and out of place, creates a heightened expression of dislocation and disorientation, which is a frequent subject of art cinema situated within the modernist or postmodernist tradition.[12] The notion of nighttime cinema in this film can be interpreted as night can go beyond a temporal definition. Rather, it can become a unique aesthetic that can be deployed as a particular style, achieved by visual images and storytelling. The quality of Lost in Translation is self-defined and designed not for the mass market but a specific sector of the audience - those, in particular, looking for certain types of aesthetics and moods that respond to their own identities or ideologies in the medium of cinema.
[1] Rebecca Solnit, A Field Guide to Getting Lost (New York: Viking, 2005), Chap. 1.
[2] Giacomo Bottà and Geoff Stahl, eds. Nocturnes : Popular Music and the Night (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019), 3.
[3] Miya Elise Mizuta. “Tokyo: Lightscapes: Cherry Blossoms at Night and the Illumination of Cultural Properties” in Cities of Light, ed. Sandy Isenstadt, Margaret Maile Petty and Dietrich Neumann (New York: Rootledge, 2015), 113.
[4] Geoff King, Lost in Translation (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 100.
[5] King, 93-94.
[6] Suzanne Ferriss, Lost in Translations (London: British Film Institute, 2023), 33.
[7] King, 99.
[8] Edward W. Said, Orientalism, (New York: Vintage Books, 1994).
[9] Ian Littlewood, The Idea of Japan : Western Images, Western Myths (London: Secker & Warburg, 1996), 7.
[10] King, 131.
[11] Nezar AlSayyad, Cinematic Urbanism : A History of the Modern from Reel to Real (New York: Routledge, 2006), 2-18.
[12] King, 126.