Lost in Translation

Sometimes a film is hard to watch not because it is bad but because it is almost too good. Lost in Translation is one of those. It is filmed so beautiful and simple that it recalls all the train rides, plane rides, hotels, elevators, bars, streets and people in my past travels. The sense of beauty, loneliness, excitement, alienation and lost is so palpable on screen that it was as if part of me was transported back to Kyoto, Paris, London and any number of places and time. It makes me want to pick up and go; yet, at the same time, afraid of it, afraid of all the coldness of steel, stone and glass. But the loneliness of being isolated in beauty is so attractive in such a self-indulgently perverted way. Everything is tainted with this incomprehensible and fleeting glimmer of desperation. It is almost a suicidal kind of beauty, an act of self-annihilation, to get lost in otherness.