Sofia Coppola’s idiosyncratic 2003 film made a huge impression on the young Johny Pitts. Two decades on, the writer and artist revisits the movie and the people who made it to investigate its enduring appeal and place in the early millennium

If you’re a geriatric millennial, as I am, the news that Lost in Translation is 20 years old will probably make you feel, simply, geriatric. When you think about it, though, the plot feels its age. An overprivileged middle-aged man (grumpy about earning $2m for a week’s work in Japan) having an affair in a five-star hotel with an overprivileged woman half his age (fresh out of Yale, cadging a free ride to Tokyo from her celeb photographer boyfriend) hardly screams Hollywood zeitgeist in 2023. Bill Murray is no longer the cool ironic choice for a younger generation, but a problematic old man, and when Lost in Translation was made, he was 52, feasibly old enough to be Scarlett Johansson’s grandfather; “Charlotte” is placed in her 20s, but the actor was just 17 at the time of filming. Not to mention the scenes in the movie in which Japanese people are mocked and reduced to such an extent I can’t believe director Sofia Coppola let the actors carry them out: “short and sweet – very Japanese”, Murray’s Bob Harris patronises after a brief greeting by his business associates, and, after seeing Charlotte’s bruised toe, suggests serving it up in a restaurant; “in this country? Somebody’s gotta prefer a black toe – haaa brack toe!”. Just a couple of cringey moments amid a litany of “Japanese people are small and can’t pronounce English” jokes.

Lost in Translation is, however, more than the sum of its parts and, try as I might, I cannot un-love it. As a child, I was lifted from a terrace house in Sheffield and transplanted to Tokyo for the best part of a year during its infamous bubble economy of the late 80s, when my dad had a role in the Japanese tour of Starlight Express, and the culture shock in the film rings true. As in Lost in Translation, we were given Japan’s five-star treatment, and surrounded by a veneer of subservience which, actually, concealed a quiet power. “Charm,” as the psychologist and author Kevin Dutton once wrote, “is the ability to roll out a red carpet for those you cannot stand in order to fast-track them, as smoothly and efficiently as possible, in the direction you want them to go.” In the end it’s Harris’s Japanese colleagues who get what they want. The 20th anniversary of Lost in Translation has prompted some grappling with the recent past, taken me down a generational rabbit hole back to the decade in which I came of age, and back to Japan with my Konica 35mm film compact, to peer behind the curtain of Sofia Coppola’s magnum opus.