Speaking my language

I think the last time I got such a warm, dream-like feel­ing from being so com­pletely immersed inside the magical world of a film was after I had just seen Amélie for the first time. This even­ing, I felt the same way as I stepped out of the cinema and into the bit­ing cold after watch­ing Lost in Trans­la­tion (yes, I know every­one has seen it by now, but I’m always late get­ting to these things).

I’m always a sucker for ‘city movies’ any­way — that sen­sa­tion, which only films viewed on the big screen can really provide, of being an insig­ni­fic­ant speck in a huge met­ro­polis of busy, buzz­ing but ulti­mately lonely people lost in the midst of flash­ing neon and the phos­phor­ous glow of street­lights. Pre­dict­ably, of course, for me that can­vas is usu­ally provided by Lon­don films such as Michael Winterbottom’s slow-motion mas­ter­piece Won­der­land, but Tokyo works just as well in this par­tic­u­lar example of the genre.

The best thing that I can say about Lost in Trans­la­tion though — as with Amélie and, indeed, Won­der­land before it — is that I clearly iden­ti­fied with the char­ac­ters. Oth­er­worldly, ques­tion­ing, dream­ing, search­ing for some­thing, a little con­fused and over­whelmed by life. Sen­ti­mental claptrap, maybe — but then if you hadn’t real­ised by now that there’s a side of me that’s par­tic­u­larly prone to sen­ti­mental claptrap, then you obvi­ously haven’t been read­ing closely enough.

Char­lotte: I just don’t know what I’m sup­posed to be.
Bob: You’ll fig­ure that out. The more you know who you are and what you want, the less you let things upset you.

Now do you see why this film struck such a chord with me?