Both nationalist filmmakers Sophia Coppola and Wong Kar-wai provide new filmic representations that reveal confrontations with national culture that are enabled by transnational exchange. The displacement into Tokyo, Japan and Buenos Aires, Argentina, becomes the means by which Coppola and Wong locate and reexamine American and Hong Kongese cultures and politics.That is, transnational exchange operates on multiple levels, showing that economics and politics, entities associated with the public sphere, are in fact highly traceable in human interactions and behavior, attributes reserved to the private domain.
Aesthetics of Lost in Translation and the setting of Tokyo, Japan
Being in Tokyo together enables them, and the film, to contest American cultural norms that deal with the familial, modes of intimacy and connection, expectations of age, etc., that reside within the American paradigm. Throughout the film, Bob and Charlotte's relationship disappoints the viewer's expectations; the film never affirms whether or not Bob and Charlotte are romantically interested in one another, nor does the film deliver the physical affirmation of this type of intimacy that is typical of any Hollywood love story. This narrative disappointment then navigates the viewer toward a specific reading of the ambiguous relationship between Charlotte and Bob, that calls into question American notions of intimacy, monogamy, fidelity, and gender roles. This mutual disassociation is what sparks the connection between Bob and Charlotte, and part of the permission granted to Charlotte and Bob to move forward with a friendship, derives from their temporary and foreign experience outside of the United States.
Moments where Bob and Charlotte lay together on a bed, or lean on each other's shoulder at a club early in the morning, reflect the ways in which Charlotte and Bob disregard and contest notions of fidelity and marriage that strongly reside in American culture. Marriage and fidelity are contested in the way that Bob and Charlotte inhabit private spaces together; that is, they seem to give each other permission to lay together on a bed in a hotel room, which seems like an atypical decision for any respectable married person to make. What does it mean, then, when displays of ambiguous infidelity become excusable or worthy of no more than a shrug? This empathy that the viewer feels for Charlotte and Bob, in part because of their lonely experience in a foreign land, then bleeds into the reading of their behavior together and raises this question as to the validity of any mode of existence to which Americans subscribe. This kind of dependence upon spatial and cultural displacement, allows for this rebellious, playful, and at times painful dismissal of American culture to come through. Ultimately, the viewer's alignment with these characters and their experience with a dark reality of American culture, leads to a forced reassessment of all American ideologies that are conventionally taken for granted.
Aesthetics of Happy Together and the setting of Buenos Aires, Argentina
Wong Kar-Wai's Happy Together stages a narrative steeped in dysfunctional relationships and national identity just as Lost in Translation; however, spatial and temporal dislocation operate in a different way in order to accommodate the subject of Hong Kong. Happy Together depicts Ho Po-Wing and Lai Yiu-fai, a gay couple from pre-handover Hong Kong, as they visit Buenos Aires, Argentina in an effort to remedy their broken relationship. They end up bringing their old relationship habits to a new space. The narrative and aesthetic erasure of Argentina's specificity, works as the device to talk about the Hong Kong condition. Just as with Lost in Translation, the opening sequence of the film directs the spectator to the filmic project. The sequence marks the moment in which Po and Fai enter Argentina, indicated by hurried close up shots of their passport pictures.
This montage, lasting a mere 7 seconds, suggests in its brevity the inconsequential and perhaps unimportant nature of the characters shown in the passport pictures. Literally, Po and Fai are introduced as one-dimensional projections on paper, rather than physical human beings.The passports could, in a different transnational reading, be emblematic of cosmopolitanism; however, the quick editing and displacing experience with the projected individuals that aesthetically marks this moment of introduction, becomes indicative of a dehumanizing transnational exchange directly marked by the economics associated with global trade. In introducing Po and Fai as one-dimensional projections, the film consolidates them under a national umbrella, allowing us to read into this aesthetic in an effort to understand the nature of that national umbrella of Hong Kong. That is, like Hong Kong, its subjects lack a full or tangible identity, as Hong Kong is a space controlled and affected by shifting notions of colonialism that literally reduce it to a landing ground where other cultures set up residency.
Cinematic Space vs. National Space
By acknowledging that spatial alterity enables a 'strengthening and reasserting' of national identity, Happy Together and Lost in Translation appropriate and address the interaction between the human 'self' and 'other' that has been directly informed by residual colonialism, the global marketplace, and contemporary cultural paradigms. Looking at the films' aesthetic and narrative representations of this binary, allows the viewer to see what constitutes Hong Kong, the United States, Japan , as well as cultural bodies altogether, all performed through the lens of human relationships.
Jessica Lipman - I am a freelance writer with a specialty in film and literary criticism, as well as general academic writing. I've written extensively on ...
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