Viewing Questions for LOST IN TRANSLATION

Viewing Questions for LOST IN TRANSLATION (Sofia Coppola, 2003).

1.     Modernity is often considered the enemy of romance, because of the social and aesthetic conservatism of the genre. In this film, too, director Coppola uses the modern setting to represent the alienation of the characters.  In considering the production design of this film and the composition of key shots, is modernity (modern architecture, modern furniture) the enemy of romance? Or does director Coppola revise modernity to make it romantic?

2.      In Cavell’s essay on “Knowledge as Transgression: It Happened One Night,” he raises several philosophical issues that illuminate Lost in Translation perhaps even more than It Happened….  Most significantly, is the “problem of other minds” (109), the idea that we can never be sure of what others think or feel.  We can never be certain that we are really being understood or are really understanding; we can never be sure that our loved ones feel the same way about us as we do about them.  How does LOST IN TRANSLATION frame this issue?  What cinematic techniques does it use to communicate this epistemological problem?

3.     Would you characterize LOST as more of a New Comedy or a Shakespearean comedy?  Be sure to discuss and interpret key scenes, and filmic details, in asserting your view.

4.     Looking at paradigmatic scenes from LOST, discuss how the mise-en-scène of those scenes develops the theme of alienation. What filmic techniques (e. g. sound, composition, selection and combination of shots) signal the characters’ alienation?

5.     In his essay on The Lady Eve, Cavell says that romantic comedies need, if not the “physics of virginity,” at least the “metaphysics of innocence” (54).  Taking either one of these films, does it offer a “metaphysics of innocence”? Is there something that the characters, either male or female, still need to learn?  Can they be innocent again for each other?

6.     Is there a Green World in this film?  Or does the film so dramatically revise romance conventions that there’s no magic place that operates as the Green World?  Further, if there is a Green World, what space functions as the “real world,” the home that the characters leave and then return to?  Is that real world treated differently here than in other romantic comedies?  You may want to think carefully about the Park Hyatt Tokyo Hotel,  which Coppola regards as almost a distinct character in her film, as she has said in interviews.