- Spike jonze sofia coppola her lost in translation movie#
- Spike jonze sofia coppola her lost in translation full#
Spike jonze sofia coppola her lost in translation full#
Her is full of these treacly moments, such as when poor Joaquin Phoenix is forced to frolic in public as Theodore's relationship with Samantha blooms, an emo-adolescent vision of happiness that in no way resembles what being in love looks or feels like. Sorry, but this is Velveeta-grade cheese. A few samples: "The past is just a story we tell ourselves" "We are only here briefly, and in this moment I want to allow myself joy" "I can feel the fear that you carry around and I wish there was something I could do to help you let go of it, because if you could, I don't think you'd feel so alone anymore." It doesn't help matters that Jonze is constantly stuffing trite epiphanies into his characters' mouths. While more physically expressive, Theodore also becomes trapped in this cage of words, and their relationship is defined by the blunt vocalization of every urge and emotion: I'm depressed, I'm horny, I'm happy, I'm jealous, I'm annoyed, I'm in love. Because Samantha has no face - no downcast eyes to hint at deeper feeling, no quivering lips to express an inner trembling - she is maddeningly verbose. In contrast, Her is drowning in words - and what vapid words they are. The scene is little more than a street in Tokyo, two actors, and a kiss, which allows the film to achieve both a huge emotional payoff and a kind of cinematic purity. This method finds its greatest expression in the famous last scene, in which Murray and Johansson tearfully part with words that can't be heard by the audience. Johansson and Murray may be joking about starting a jazz band or silently sharing a cigarette at a karaoke bar, but what is actually happening beneath these banal surfaces is exhilaratingly apparent. The characters say one thing - or often, nothing at all - while the camera says another, conveying rich undercurrents of meaning. Lost in Translation is a triumph of oblique storytelling.
Spike jonze sofia coppola her lost in translation movie#
The point is not to delve into the private lives of Jonze and Coppola, or to examine whether, as David Edelstein at New York put it, " Her is an admission of obliviousness and a lament for it." Rather, the movies are so similar that the comparison offers a useful instruction for why Her fails as a movie on a fundamental level.
(This is either purely coincidental, or suggestive of a surrogate scheme that would be far too knotty to untangle here.) (For young American filmmakers, apparently nothing evokes alienation like an Asian megalopolis.) Further entwining the two movies is the casting of Johansson in Her as Theodore's love interest, the operating system Samantha. Lost in Translation is set in Tokyo, while Her is a vision of a future Los Angeles that both sprawls and rises like Manhattan, a feat achieved, with alternating degrees of success, by splicing footage of L.A.
But instead of finding solace in the figurative arms of a computer program, she develops a deep, if platonic, relationship with Bill Murray. The latter film follows a young woman (Scarlett Johansson) who is drifting away from her husband, a weaselly, shallow, distracted character who has long been rumored to be a stand-in for Jonze himself. For all of Jonze's preoccupations about the digital age, for all the implications of spending the bulk of our time interacting with disembodied voices, the movie's heart - if that is not too quaint a metaphor - is a tale of love, loss, and renewal.Īs a result, many have speculated that Her is a response to a movie with a similar plot, aesthetic, and Pitchfork-approved soundtrack: Lost in Translation, which was directed by Jonze's ex-wife Sofia Coppola.
In a gushing review at The New Yorker, Anthony Lane wrote, "Who would have guessed, after a year of headlines about the NSA and about the porousness of life online, that our worries on that score - not so much the political unease as a basic ontological fear that our inmost self is possibly up for grabs - would be best enshrined in a weird little romance by the man who made Being John Malkovich and Where the Wild Things Are?"īut beneath Her's sci-fi premise is a more conventional story about a man (Theodore Twombly, played by Joaquin Phoenix) recovering from the dissolution of his marriage.
The movie has been praised for its timeliness and topicality, capturing the anxieties of an era in which we spend less time gazing into each other's eyes than into glowing screens of varying sizes.
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