Sofia Coppola's film Lost In Translation came out in 2003 and felt like an instant classic, a film in the lineage of late night, word of mouth movies that gain cult followings. In fact, Lost In Translation went way beyond cult and was a major commercial success as well as a critical one. The film's stars- Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson- are the atypical odd couple thrown together by circumstance, both disenchanted with their lot and adrift and at sea. Coppola wanted the film to depict the jetlagged, disconnected state people feel when they arrive in Japan, westerners who have flown half way round the world and are bewildered by Tokyo and deprived of sleep. Both are alienated form their partners, both lost and looking for a connection. There is little in the way of plot or narrative, Coppola wasn't sure Murray would actually turn up to film and it was largely shot in a less than a month on location using natural light as far as possible. Many of the street scenes were shot on the streets without extras-- Tokyo's citizens are the extras. It also has an ambiguous ending, something that adds rather than takes away. What did Bill Murray whisper to Scarlett Johansson?
The soundtrack was a success too. It was supervised by Brian Reitzell who was told by Coppola that rather than a score she wanted what sounded like a mixtape, similar to the ones Reitzell sent her while she was writing the film, tapes filled with dream pop and shoegaze bands. The soundtrack ended up being exactly that- after the opening thirty seconds of ambient Tokyo street sounds there are songs by Death In Vegas, Air, My Bloody Valentine, Phoenix, Sebastien Tellier and The Jesus And Mary Chain (since the release of Lost In Translation Just Like Honey has become by some distance their most streamed song). Squarepusher is there too, along with a couple of Brian Reitzell tracks. For many people, me included however, the real pull of the Lost In Translation soundtrack was the four new pieces of music from MBV main man Kevin Shields.
Shields hadn't been seen out much since Loveless in 1991 apart from his period providing extremely noisy guitar for Primal Scream (the Shields, Mani, Throb, Innes frontline of the band from around the same time is possibly the band's finest live incarnation). For Lost In Translation, he turned the noise down (although City Girl carries plenty of MBV's noisy disorientation). Goodbye is ambient guitar, the sound of a hotel room late at night, high rise, black sky through glass...
Coppola convinced Kevin to provide some sounds for the film- she was after melancholy and 'floating, jetlagged weirdness'. Reitzell wanted 'a droning, swaying, beautiful feeling'. Shields delivers on all counts.
For his last piece of music for the film Shields put down the guitar and plugged in the drum machine and synths, the arpeggios dancing across a hissy rhythm before coming to an abrupt end.
