Fifteen years ago, writer-director Sofia Coppola's Lost in Translation became a surprise hit, its particular melancholic spirit resonating deeply with far more people than Coppola ever imagined possible. After all, this was very much a personal film, forged out of her own loneliness and existential angst over feeling disconnected from everyone and everything in her life. Clearly, many of us could relate. Fifteen years on, many of us still do. On a few occasions on social media recently, I've noticed some viewers reassessing the film through the lens of contemporary understandings of historically cliched portrayals of relationships between older men and younger women in film. For some, the relationship between Bill Murray's Bob and Scarlett Johansson's Charlotte—mostly platonic beyond a few embraces and chaste kisses, but over the course of the movie it's obvious that each character is tempted to take things to the next level—has taken on a whole n...
we are all in the gutter, but some of us are looking at the stars