The Anxieties of Influence
Sofia Coppola, Francis Ford Coppola, and Goethe
LOST IN TRANSLATION
In the summer of 1979, Francis Ford Coppola, while in the full post-APOCALYPSE NOW flush of success, announced, among other projects, a desire to make a film based on Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's ELECTIVE AFFINITIES (DIE WAHLVERWANDTSCHAFTEN), a novel about infidelity, physical and emotional attraction, and the clash of two couples. Coppola, however, was going to transport ELECTIVE AFFINITIES from Goethe's location of a German country estate around 1809 when the book was published to Tokyo in the 1980s. "My super-production, my great work that I was thinking of, was going to be basically taken from the Goethe novel ELECTIVE AFFINITIES," Coppola recently told the AP. "And I had this idea to set it in modern Japan starring a film director who makes a film in Japan."
As he did a lot at the time, Coppola, evoked visions of a technological future that included faster communication and more publicly accessible tools for recording reality (ideas in which he has proved to be most prescient, although professionally he's been unable to capitalize on his prognostications). At different times, Coppola also said that the film would be eight hours long, and be filmed over many years, with the characters aging.
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Coppola openly discussed ELECTIVE AFFINITIES while he was working on the deal with Orion that culminated in HAMMETT and BLACK STALLION. Other studios wanted him to make films, as well. In order to make EA, Coppola studied Kabuki and Japanese culture in general. " In Japanese drama," he said, "scenery, story, actors, and dance are all components. To them, the illusion part is better at getting to the mysteries of life than the naturalistic." Apparently, the plan for EL was to make four films, over a ten-year period, one film each about the married couple, the girl, and the other man. In fact, he was in Japan, reading Goethe and thinking about the movie when MGM offered him $2 million dollars to make ONE FROM THE HEART. Coppola partly took on the film because the Ginza section of Tokyo, which he turned into Las Vegas and built on a Los Angeles sound stage, inspired him.
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Coppola never made ELECTIVE AFFINITIES, but he was thinking about the film as late as the time he made GODFATHER 3. In January or February of 1983 Coppola apparently began working on another variation of EA, called MEGALOPOLIS, and had 400 pages of notes, and script pages. He was still talking about that film when he announced LE RIBELLION DI CATILINA in 1989, which sounded a lot like MEGALOPOLIS, with its bent sense of time and its plot that leapt from Ancient Rome to modern Manhattan. After he made TUCKER, he announced MEGALOPOLIS yet again, but as always, the money wasn't there.
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As it happened, Coppola never made his peculiar adaptation of ELECTIVE AFFINITIES. Instead, Siegfried Kühn shot one in 1974, then the Taviani Brothers produced one in 1996, with Isabelle Huppert. But anyone familiar with Coppola's short list of unrealized projects is likely to think that his daughter has. LOST IN TRANSLATION is a lot like the Goethe novel. Both are about a married man who falls for a younger woman. The biggest difference is that in the movie the man's wife isn't present, and the young woman is also married. Also, Goethe's story is a tragedy that explores the nature of marriage and the laws of attraction. Coppola's movie stops short of tragedy but while also exploring mutual attraction also includes dislocation, alienation, and mid-life and young-life crises in a delicate package of quiet moments and often unstated emotions.
Sofia Coppola has had a remarkable career despite being in the shadow of her father. She is credited with authorship of Coppola's ELOISE-esque contribution to NEW YORK STORIES. Controversially, she had the female lead role in THE GODFATHER PART 3, replacing Wynona Ryder, who dropped out at the last minute (and who would later work with Coppola in DRACULA). With THE VIRGIN SUICIDES, Coppola's adaptation of Jeffrey Eugenides's novel, credited to her as both director and writer, she made a most assured and dynamic directorial debut (in 2001, Francis Ford Coppola's son Roman also made a directorial debut with the insiderish movie pastiche CQ).
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The daughter of one great director and married at the time to Spike Jonze (BEING JOHN MALKOVICH, ADAPTATION), dyspeptic Hollywoodians could speculate wildly that Sofia Coppola's debut was godfathered by these twin forces at opposite ends of the directorial spectrum, a form of sexism, so to speak, by other means. Internet posters have already accused Coppola of getting credit for lines probably improvised by Murray, perhaps unaware that on some sets and certainly with some actors improvisation is a key production element. They don't seem to take this stance with LOST IN TRANSLATION, though, which as of this writing has won four Golden Globe awards and been nominated for four Oscars.
Francis Ford Coppola may have had deeply personal reasons for his interest in ELECTIVE AFFINITIES. As is now well known, Coppola's marriage reached a breaking point during the filming of APOCALYPSE NOW. Coppola's wife talks about it in her diary of the movie's making, and one Coppola bio actually identifies a woman the director had an affair with. It's always hazardous to hold the life up to the work and look for comparisons and motivations, but both Francis Ford Coppola's and Sofia Coppola's films have autobiographical elements. Coppola has always been an intensely passionate and personal director. In another context it would be possible to argue that his films, despite their ambitious Tradition of Quality seeming-impersonality, are surprisingly indicative of Coppola's private life and concerns. If nothing else, his films reflect a Coppolean lifestyle: lots of kids and food and cars and characters living on the brink of disaster.
LOST IN TRANSLATION is also passionate and possibly autobiographical. Charlotte is a young woman married to a photographer; Coppola was married to a director. Charlotte's husband knows an actress who is not unlike Cameron Diaz, whom Jonze directed in BEING JOHN MALKOVICH. Bob Harris is in Tokyo to film a Suntory whiskey commercial; Coppola pere shot one there with Kurosawa.
Aside from characters named Charlotte, the connections between the Goethe novel and LOST IN TRANSLATION are ephemeral. But the project was probably so in the air in the Coppola household that elements of it couldn't but help bleed into Sofia's film. Set in era of the Napoleonic wars, ELECTIVE' AFFINITY's plot concerns one Baron Eduard and his wife, Charlotte. They are a rather frosty couple (perhaps a common temperature in marriages of a certain social class at the time), and live isolated from society in his old country estate. Charlotte enjoys their reclusive lifestyle, but Eduard feels edgy and isolated, and so, after a contracted negotiation with Charlotte, he invites his down-on-his-luck friend Otto, an architect, to visit. Charlotte, in response, invites her god daughter, Ottilie. Eduard and Ottilie are attracted to each other, but so are Charlotte and Otto. Eduard, being a gentleman of a certain age, is free to pursue his feelings, but Charlotte is constrained by social conventions, and her situation with Otto comes to nothing.
Lost in Translation comes in four large-scale sections. The film begins with Murray waking up in a cab, as if from a dream, or as if he were stepping into a dream. When Murray's Bob Harris gets his first view of Tokyo, he looks with boyish awe at the fantasia of lights. LiT is very good with cars. Automobiles figure in the film significantly, and it has some beautiful moments of sorrowful women in cars as the wind blows their hair.
Murray is a Bruce Willis style aging action star making a Suntory ad for $2 million dollars. Here he has entered the world of DEMONLOVER, of hotel bars, meeting rooms, and porn on the hotel TV. Like Charlotte, he suffers from sleeplessness, linking the characters to the other great insomnia films about displaced people, such as TAXI DRIVER and INSOMNIA. Meanwhile, Charlotte's husband has no trouble sleeping, and is acclimated to the mechanized, artificial aspects of the place (like the Richard Harris character in RED DESERT). When Bob is in the shower, and his general sense of alienation, evokes memories of GROUNDHOG DAY. The film occasionally goes in for broad humor, such as the scene of Bob on the treadmill, but the purpose of that is probably to contrast with the idea that Bob in his movie life was known for driving stunt cars.
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Scarlett's Charlotte is introduced about seven minutes in, and the two characters first see each other for the first time eight minutes in. Before they formally meet, Scarlett explores Japan (critics of the film have complained that all she does is lay around her hotel room, but that charge is easily refuted; the DVD also features a few deleted scenes that show her exploring; though it is true that she spends a lot of time on her bed. Charlotte and beds is a running visual theme of the film). Coppola includes a shock cut from a Japanese Shinto rite to the Tokyo cityscape, emphasizing the disparities in Japanese culture and its own cultural battles between tradition and modernism, just as the film itself follows the melding of the old (Bob) and the young (Charlotte).
After crying into the telephone to a friend ("Why did I marry him?"), Charlotte armors herself, like the characters in SCANDAL, for a night out. In a modified dark night of the soul hotel room scene like Martin Sheen's in APOCALYPSE NOW, Charlotte hits her toe. Meanwhile someone sends Bob a hooker who comically mangles the language. This scene contrasts with the scenes between Bob and Charlotte on beds, and Bob's brief affair with the singer.
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At the 27-minute mark, Charlotte and her husband run into the Diaz equivalent, and Charlotte's recoiling from the ditzy blonde shows her emotional equality with Bob, who is world weary of his career as a consumable product. Later Charlotte sees her at a press conference, and this and other scenes offer a critique of Hollywood, with Bob and Charlotte's aching self-inquiry contrasting with the razzle dazzle phoniness of the industry (unfortunately, in the very network of publicity and promotion that the real life Sofia Coppola is not going through). The tea ceremony and the flower arranging ritual that Charlotte also stumbles into in the Park Hyatt hotel represent the authenticity of ritual and tradition in contrast to the publicity rituals of Hollywood movies.
Bob and Charlotte are frequently linked even before they meet. They watch the same program on television, and go to the bar at the same time. Finally, 32 minutes into the film, they meet. The woman who has married too young meets the man who has been married for 25 years. Their interaction here and throughout the movie is awkward, weird, funny, and spontaneous. Are people who are attracted to each other always nervous?
After the significant karaoke scene, Bob puts Charlotte to bed and then has a domestic talk on the phone with his unseen wife about color swatches, a moment reminiscent of similar moments in MANHUNTER. The film scrutinizes Bob in these scenes, and his conversations go on longer than they usually do in movies. (The only off or obvious moment in the movie happens here when Bob says "I love you," into the dial tone.)
The incident in the hospital, which happens an hour in, brings them closer together, and the look on Johansson's face coming out the door and seeing Bob is marvelous ("Is that for me?" "It can be for you"). The film's next high point occurs during their long conversation on the bed, one of the densest conversations in the history of movies. "I'm stuck," she says, and later notes that, "Nobody ever tells you that." Bob blinks as only Bill Murray blinks, and gets what I think is his first real close up in the film. The moment when Charlotte puts her foot on his hip is the sex in the film. His touching her foot is echoed the next day when she visits a temple in the shadow of Mount Fuji and sees a couple marrying in a Buddhist ceremony delicately holding hands.
Bob, full of angst and self-loathing, looking at himself in mirrors, escapes himself by becoming "just another movie star," by fucking the American singer in the hotel's bar. This complication, coming at the 1:20 mark, feels a tad contrived. Yet later, both Bob and Charlotte rally and after "the worst lunch" they walk around, touch hands, and have an awkward kiss in the elevator (where they first saw each other, coming full circle). The rest of the movie is told more visually than through dialogue, and it is significant when Bob, surrounded by people, dumps a tall blonde for Charlotte when she enters the lobby. The film soon ends with shots of buildings that look like they could have come out of SOLARIS.
So what is "lost in translation" between these characters? I suppose we could take it literally: they have been "translated" to a foreign culture, one that makes them realize that they are deeply "lost" as human beings. One lost in his career; the other is lost at the very outset of her career, poised between college and work, in danger of becoming a vacuous married woman, the equivalent of Bob's wife, never seen, always only heard on the phone, a stay at home.
It pays to go back to Goethe's title. Like the old fashioned concept of the ether, wahlverwandtschaften was a scientific term (which seemingly no longer has currency) coined by a Swedish chemist that referred to variable chemical reactions dependent on different combinations of properties and their interactions. Like Pynchon's use of entropy, Goethe uses a scientific term as a metaphor for a larger view of human beings and society. It's a complicated analogy, and it took Goethe a whole book to put it forward, but the four people in his tale are the equivalent of how chemicals interact in different combos. Two pairs that are each impregnable separately become vulnerable when they are joined. Those chemicals that have natural affinities that strengthen each other are vulnerable when thrown together. The two couples in Goethe's novel are secure with each other until they all meet as a foursome. I'm sure that Francis Ford Coppola could explain all this better than me.
LOST IN TRANSLATION takes two couples, but they don't interact as they do in Goethe's novel. They don't have to. In Coppola's view they are each burdened with the weight of their spouse even when they aren't there. She has dramatized Freud's old notion that whenever two people make love there are six people in the room. Back home in their secure settings, Bob and Charlotte were happy, or thought they were happy. With their spouses, they were impregnable. But adrift in the permanent night of Tokyo it's like they've started over. Alone, they have no support derived from their spouses (Charlotte's husband is there without really being there). What's lost in translation is not what you are failing to get out of the foreign culture, but what you are failing to bring from your own. Fortunately, they are able to find each other.
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LOST IN TRANSLATION has already won several Golden Globes, with Oscars, DGAs, WGAs, and other awards waiting in the wings. Coppola, obviously uncomfortable in the spotlight, was not particularly insightful about the origins of her film when interviewed after the Golden Globe ceremony. Surely the glitz and glamour of Hollywood media is not the place to find a thoughtful or detailed account of the film's origins. The DVD, which came out February 3rd, has a video interview with Coppola and Murray, but it doesn't provide any confirmation of the film as a loose adaptation of ELECTIVE AFFINITIES. In fact, Coppola doesn't even really have to confirm these slim connections between ELECTIVE AFFINITIES and her original screenplay. In translating both the obvious and hidden meanings of a film, the only thing lost is obscurity.
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