Lost In Translation

Lost in Translation is an Academy Award-winning 2003 comedy-drama film. It centers on Bob Harris (Bill Murray), an American movie star whose career (and seemingly, marriage) is in decline. The film joins him as he arrives in Tokyo, Japan to film a Suntory whisky commercial. Unfulfilled with the work, he meets Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson), a recent Yale philosophy graduate who is unsure of the direction she would like her life to take. She is married to a celebrity photographer (played by Giovanni Ribisi), and is in Japan to accompany her husband on work trip to take publicity photos for a rock band and, later, a female movie star, but has become bored and lonely due to her husband's preoccupation with work. Although both are married, Bob and Charlotte share a friendship that borders on unconsummated romance, while briefly exploring the cultural life of Tokyo and the surrounding area. The central focus of the film is on the two characters' feelings of alienation, not only with their immediate Japanese surroundings, but their own separate senses of alienation from those closest to them, and their uncertainty about the direction of their lives.