Sex Scene

I've been wanting to write about the sex scene in Lost In Translation for a while -- been waiting for everyone in the whole wide world to see the movie before I write about it and wreck the whole thing. I really can't believe they pulled off the sex scene in such a new and fresh way.

Poor Bob (played by Bill Muirray). He's falling so hard for Charlotte (played by Scarlett Johannson). The May-December romance is a funny, odd, sweet, confusing affair. They are both driving each other a little crazy, but not crossing the line of physical intimacy. Strangely, they cross lines of emotional intimacy early on -- sharing inside jokes and insights that far more "intimate" lovers might not ever share. They "get one another" in terms of who they are in their lives -- at very different times in their lives. She's freshly married and young but wise for her 22ish years. He's jaded, been around the block, maybe a lot of blocks, but has a sweetness and an innocence you wouldn't count on finding in that old pile of bones and flesh.

Just as things really start to heat up and you can feel the longing in their very skin for one another -- this coupled with too many long empty days when her huband leaves her alone in the hotel -- together with a fun, friendly, sexy relationship that's obviously blooming between them -- the impossible happens. Bob ends up in bed with the lounge singer from the hotel, we we all have been making fun of from the beginning of the film. To make things worse, of course, Charlotte drops by his room in the morning and discovers this.

Talk about a surprising twist. I loved it. It said a lot. It made me want to say, "Hey, Charlotte, you're driving him crazy, he's a man, give him a break." She was a little more unforgiving than she should have been I think. Because really the sex scene with the lounge singer wasn't at all sexy. It was nothing. It existed only to create contrast between the tawdry affair Bob and Charlotte might have had and the real sexual encounter they did have. (In case you haven't seen it, they NEVER do have sex.) The whole film is one long sex scene -- a terrific subtle portrait of what is truly sexy -- wanting someone, playing with their mind, longing for them, waiting for them, getting ready for what might happen, imagining it, getting closer, pulling back, stepping forward, going shy on a guy, getting bold -- all of it. And the sheer comfort of clinging to someone in a world that is so hard to understand some days, like wrapping your arms around a piling of a still standing pier in the middle of a raging storm, ocean waves crashing all around you. Sometimes we need someone to remind us how to just ride out the storm.

I still think the sexiest line in the movie is when Bob says to Charlotte, who admits to being pretty lost in her life, "I'm not worried about you." Something wonderful there. To have someone give you that confidence in a simple but intimate and loving way, to say, "You'll be fine. I know it." A most soulful, delicate, intercourse.