, Columnist
The Complex Legacy of ‘Lost in Translation,’ 20 Years On
The movie introduced a generation to Tokyo and Japanese whiskey, but its depictions of the people have aged poorly.
This iconic film hasn’t aged well.
Image: Focus Features
This article is for subscribers only.
It has been 20 years since an aging Bill Murray and a young Scarlett Johansson introduced Tokyo to a generation in Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation.
The legacy of the Oscar-winning movie, which hit screens on Sept. 12, 2003, is mixed. It’s the film that launched a thousand travel blogs, helping propel a tourism boom as it catapulted Japan onto the list of exotic Asian destinations where young philosophy majors could go to find themselves. Yet many of its depictions of the Japanese, questionable even then, are uncomfortable in a modern light.