The first shot of Sofia Coppola’s 2003 breakthrough Lost In Translation is of Scarlett Johansson’s underwear-clad rear. It’s an image which seems framed for the male gaze—especially since the movie then cuts to a close-up of Bill Murray in a taxi, looking through the window, gazing at other sites in Japan.
The four earlier movies by women directors nominated for Best Picture Oscars included some nudity and sex scenes, but Johansson with her head cut off and her rear turned to the camera is I think the first image in any of the five which is unambiguously and frankly objectifying.
The cheesecake opening isn’t typical of the rest of the film. But it’s an important and insistent break with its predecessors. The four earlier Oscar-nominated films by women directors all focused on disability, all featured a central romance (except Awakenings), and all were broadly melodrama weepies (except, arguably, The Piano).
Lost In Translation—nominated a full decade after the last film by a woman director—takes pains to set itself off from the (very circumscribed) traditions of mainstream cinema by women directors. Instead, it picks up the tradition of male mid-life crisis movies, like Cassavetes’ Husbands or any number of films by Woody Allen. That opening, focusing on Johansson’s body rather than her head, functions as a kind of validating genre marker. It doesn’t (just) express lust, but rather is meant to demonstrate that Coppola has learned from, and deserves to be in the company of, serious filmmakers.
Coppola is, then, a younger woman claiming the legacy of older men (not least her famous father), and the movie’s narrative mirrors this theme of ambivalent apprenticeship. Bob Harris (Murray) is an actor in career decline visiting Japan—where he remains a star—to shoot some whiskey commercials. Charlotte (Johansson) is a recent Yale philosophy graduate who’s traveling with her husband, a celebrity photographer. Both are dissatisfied, bored, jet-lagged, and unhappy in their marriages. They strike up a May-December not-quite-romantic friendship, wandering through Tokyo’s karaoke bars and sushi restaurants, giggling, dancing, and occasionally baring their souls.
Japan, where they both feel out of place, is a symbol of the way in which Bob and Charlotte are adrift in their own lives. Bob is more and more estranged from his wife. Charlotte isn’t sure what career she wants to pursue or how she should pursue it, though she muses she might want to be a writer (like Coppola) or a photographer (like director Coppola.)
Bob’s story—his nebbish despair as he slouches from humiliation to humiliation, his quick way with a quip—again recalls Manhattan or Dudley Moore comedies. Charlotte’s mid-life crisis for young women is less familiar even as it mirrors the male psychodrama. Bob tells Charlotte to keep writing as they’re curled up (more or less chastely) in bed. In the movie’s closing scene he whispers something we don’t hear in her ear, and then kisses her (more or less chastely).
Per the usual mid-life crisis film, Charlotte’s a young, sexy breath of fresh air in Bob’s life; she makes him appreciate existence in general and Japan in particular, just as (they joke) a Porsche might. In exchange, he becomes a mentor figure, assuring her she’s talented and special, and that her life will have success and meaning.
That bargain, arguably, is echoed in the meta-genre positioning of the film itself, in which the male mid-life crisis tropes validate Coppola’s ambitions and accomplishment. The movie looks, in important respects, like movies directed by, and for men; it references the tutelage of men. And that makes it important and mature. Maybe Bob, the movie star, at the end there is whispering to Charlotte, “You’re going to get an Oscar nomination.”
I generally dislike male mid-life crisis movies, and I’m not much of a fan of Lost in Translation. But while I blame Coppola for making a movie I don’t really want to sit through ever again, I don’t blame her for making a male genre movie. People’s relationship to gender is complicated, and lots of women enjoy (supposedly) male genre films and, for that matter, cheesecake, just as lots of men enjoy romance or melodrama weepies.
The issue rather is that Hollywood has been so sexist for so long, and female directors have had so little opportunity to make films, that—especially in mainstream cinema—mentorship, expertise, knowledge, and validated tradition are almost inevitably framed as male. Maybe it’s a coincidence that after 10 years, when the Oscars finally chose to honor a women director, it was for a movie by the child of Francis Ford Coppola about how an awesome aging industry insider took a young woman under his wing. The suspicion, though, is that the judges could see the virtues in this particular film by a woman director because Coppola made sure they didn’t need to do much translating.