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My 20 Favorite Films

Where the Relationship Has No Name

Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation

Terry Barr
4 min readMay 19, 2022

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Photo by Jezael Melgoza on Unsplash

It’s been a while since my previous film entry, Alfred Hitchcock’s 1954 classic, Rear Window. There will be time and there will be other Hitch films on this list, but shifting gears — from a courtyard in Greenwich Village to a elite hotel in Tokyo — it’s time to consider other forms of late-night watching and guilt-induced insomnia.

I remember walking out of the Hollywood 20 Cinema after viewing Sofia Coppola’s 2003 gem Lost In Translation, thinking about the stunning visuals, the score, songs that make me weep, and relationships that by any other name would be, and are, adulterous.

Apparently, the couple in front of me wasn’t so enraptured, or even rapt:

“That was the most disgusting thing I’ve ever seen,” the woman in the couple offered.

She clearly hasn’t watched any John Waters, Tobe Hooper or James Cameron film, but I digress.

If the man with her said anything, I didn’t hear it, which may be the point. In Lost In Translation, men of every age get to step into a world where a young woman named Charlotte (Scarlett Johannson) simply can’t stop looking at them/him.

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Terry Barr
Terry Barr

Written by Terry Barr

I write about music, culture, equality, and my Alabama past in The Riff, The Memoirist, Prism and Pen, Counter Arts, and am an editor for Plethora of Pop.

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