Before Tokyo, She Was Everything

We watched Lost in Translation without the sound last night, a friend and I half-ignoring it while we talked. But at some point it pulled us back—Scarlett alone in that hotel room, the Tokyo skyline doing all the heavy lifting—and we ended up on the subject of her. How completely she owned that film. How the decade since had been a slow accumulation of franchise work and magazine covers building a wall between us and whoever she was in Coppola’s apartment.

Then Kevin sent me a set of photos I hadn’t seen: Scarlett at home, in her underwear, draped across garden furniture in enormous sunglasses with a cigarette between her lips. Nothing performed about any of it. Just her existing, visibly real, looking exactly like the reason you’d cross a city at the wrong hour and immediately regret leaving.

So I need recommending back. Give me the films where she still has that quality—unhurried, slightly absent, looking through things rather than at them. There must be more of them. Come over and bring your copy. I’ve got popcorn.