Lost in Translation

Sofia Coppola has said she wanted Lost in Translation to feel like a Wong Kar-wai film set in Tokyo — the same grammar of longing, the same two people in a city who almost connect and then don't. In the Mood for Love is the direct model: desire as proximity, missed by centimeters. Ozu's Tokyo Story is the other ancestor — the city as a place where people pass each other in corridors without ever really meeting.