It’s often difficult to answer when someone asks of your favorite movie. There are countless fabulous movies out there to choose from. But if you’ve watched enough of them from the large selection available, you naturally come across a few that particularly resonate in your mind. These selected few probably impact you the most powerfully because of the kind of life that you lived; some films have elements that invoke sentiments only of your own. This is why I love asking people about their favorite movies; they tell so much about the person in an instant.
An experience of viewing a movie depends a whole lot based on where you watched it, with whom you watched it, how you felt at the time, and so on. Everything about you at the time of viewing creates a tight bond with the movie that’s irrevocable at any other time or space. I don’t like to re-watch movies because, no matter how much I love the film, I can never recreate the effusive sentiment that had once bloomed inside.
When someone asks me what my favorite movie is, I come to a conclusion based on how much the film moved me on my first viewing. A film moves me when it elicits a sweet image of “beauty” at reminiscence. My kind of movies is one that I can think back on and sigh a little joy of satisfaction—that there is beauty in the world that I can always look forward to seeing. I may actually even say that it’s the memory of the movie, and not the movie itself, that gradually moves me.
It so happens to be, that, at the top of the tier of my kind of movies, is Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation. For the longest time, I couldn’t figure out why I loved the movie so much. I didn’t know how it grappled me so hard and swept away both my breath and tears. It was so shockingly beautiful and joyful to think back to it, and I didn’t even know why.
I wrote a short piece on Lost in Translation around this time last year, and I wanted to expand on it because three paragraphs for my favorite movie simply aren’t enough. Here is the piece that I had posted on Tumblr (it was my only means of writing at the time):
“When Bob and Charlotte meet, they first come across to me as like other adults desperate to find ways out of their unfortunate, jaded lives. They are both unhappily married but are rather, surprisingly, compliant to their distress. They do not seem to fight, or even want to try to fight, to reverse their lives gone astray. Nevertheless, they immediately connect with one another because of their similarity as born-and-raised Americans, without a clue to what they are doing in a country that speaks little to no language of their own. As much as they are lost from the translation from Japanese to English and vice versa, they are also lost in their own adulthood: Charlotte’s longing eyes search outside her empty hotel room window and Bob’s diminishing wine only fills up again to obscure whatever the bottom of the glass may reveal. Figuratively, as well as literally, Bob and Charlotte are both lost in translation.
Bob and Charlotte are longing for something they do not yet know; they are both lost in the process of replenishing what is missing in their lives. Surely, they know that their decayed love life is central to their unhappiness, but it is their inability to act against it that leaves them so hopeless and directionless. Thus, when they make eye contact in the bar, they reckon that maybe, just maybe, the other can set his or her path straight. This instant, mutually dependent relationship unravels each character’s disheveled life, and ultimately reveals that this serendipitous friendship may be fleeting but as powerful as any other.
As I struggle to hear Bob’s final words to Charlotte and am dismayed to find them inaudible, I realize that I am lost in the search for my own direction. Like the lost words, I am engulfed by the loudness of busy paths and peoples, unable to decide what to make of the film’s ending and my own life’s confusion. Then, I begin to hope that the muted words and the final heart-wrenching embrace have ultimately paved a way for the two lost souls.”
Several years after viewing the film, I still think of the heart-wrenching embrace of the two lost souls. What really sunk in my memory, however, is actually the hint of smile that emerged on the crying façade of Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) after this embrace. My memory, through time, filtered the scene that affected me the most. If not for this hint of smile, I can only imagine that I may not have even remembered that I watched this movie.
Charlotte’s hint of smile led me to think—I may be totally confused and lost in translation, but there will always be an opportunity to turn it around, throw a little smile, and leave it all behind.
I had written above, “I am engulfed by the loudness of busy paths and peoples, unable to decide what to make of the film’s ending and my own life’s confusion.” I guess I thought I was just a confused adolescent that needed one solution, my one Bob, to unravel my messy life. Now I realize that there is never going to be a time where there isn’t something to unravel; there will always be confusion, a conflict that I will struggle to overcome. And a solution will always manage to pop up, if only, I look for one.
Lost in Translation also confirms why I love movies so much, because it shows that the tiniest piece of a film, like the trace of Charlotte’s lips almost making into a smile, can change everything for the audience. This smile gradually became the definition of optimism and the base of my motto—to always find light within the shadows of obscurity.
So, when you get a chance, ask me. What is my favorite movie? And I will answer: My favorite movie is Lost in Translation, and it defines a great part of me. Oh, I can go on and on, if you would only let me.
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