Corporate Video Production: What Film Are We Watching?

This week at Crash Symphony Productions, in order to inform our approach to corporate video production, we’re watching Lost in Translation (2003) by Sofia Coppola, starring Bill Murray and Scarlett Johanssen as an unlikely friendship between a young and ignored woman, and an old, lonely actor stuck in an alienating marriage. It’s set beautifully in Tokyo, where the culture shock is played to dazzling effect.
It’s a stunning film, with an entrancing, hypnotic pace, and the lonliness of the two characters is made palpable but the stunning cinematograhy and editing and direction of Sofia Coppola. It’s incredibly non-verbal, but very well written.

The film features beautiful and slow-moving shots of Tokyo. It’s part of a swathe of excellent films that came out in the early 2000s. It remains as one of the best and most memorable, and it’s still watched and admired today, and it stands to become a classic. It’s one of my favourites.
Of course, the things to which the title refers to as being ‘lost in translation’ are multiple in nature, ranging from the obvious to the very subtle. The tensions, interpersonal and emotional, are foregrounded by the absence of dialogue, which adds another element to the mis-translations of the film. Not only are Bob and Charlotte lost in a culture and language that is foreign to them, but they are also lost within themselves and their own frameworks of their lives, which have fallen apart slowly around them.

Details

Country:

USA | Japan

Language:

English | Japanese | German | French

Release Date:

9 January 2004 (UK) See more »

Also Known As:

Perdidos en Tokio See more »

Filming Locations:

Omote-Sando, Tokyo, Japan See more