War of the worlds (aka White Palace, aka Lost in Translation)

I've been thinking alot about worlds recently - worlds I have known before, worlds I have known and don't want to go back to, worlds I have known and am toying about revisiting, worlds I have known and will be revisiting and wondering what it would be like, worlds I know now that I like, don't like and can't decide whether I like, worlds I want to know ... (yeah, think that pretty much covers everything).

So last night I watched Lost in Translation, where two different worlds (Bob and Charlotte - old and young; glamourous and vicariously glamourous; resigned and to-be-resigned) briefly collided for a week (?) in yet another different world (Tokyo - lit by a trillion neon lights, crazy, incomprehensible, inscrutable, impenetrable; ergo, the classic East Asian Other). Yet it was a beautiful meeting - brief, ephemeral, almost fatefully transitory, but (or maybe therefore) innocent and hopeful - which became a totally weird outcome in a crazy situation where two worlds which in most other circumstances wouldn't understand each other came almost sublimely together and found a common empathy.

**Aside: I can't describe how much I hated Coppola's The Virgin Suicides - her first effort - which I felt was pretentious to the point of making me want to walk out (and I very, very, very seldom...I almost never do that to any film). And, really, even the most angelic would have to hide one's cynicism at evaluating any of Coppola's efforts once one sees American Zoetrope in the credits. But LIT took me completely by surprise. It not only had all the right touches, but in the right places and with the right pressures. This is, purely and simply, a labour of love - only someone who had gone through it all and earned the credentials could write like that about life, love, marriage, family, loneliness and friendship. My cynicism vanished - more power to her.**

So all that, in turn, made me think of another film about the meeting of worlds: the excellent-until-the-last-thirty-seconds-whereby-the-film-decided-to-commit-harakiri White Palace by Luis Mandoki. (Very) briefly summed up, it is a story about working-class waitress Nora (Susan Sarandon) and upper middle-class "great catch" ad man Max (James Spader) and their romance and relationship. Again, another meeting of different worlds - class, social circumstances (she lives in Dogtown, he pays $1200 in rent for his apartment), religion (he's Jewish, she's a "lapsed Catholic"), age (he's way younger than her). The implicit premise of the film's ending is that all those factors above can be transcended simply by common experience (they have both suffered tragic bereavement) and, well, sharing good sex (yes, we do see shades of Annie "Bull Durham" Savoy in Nora). Now, really, I ask you: is life that simple?

How do we meet different worlds? I watched the part where Nora attends Thanksgiving with Max at a gathering thrown by the latter's rich, Jewish friends. Ok, I'm not a waitress and I've never had to go to a Jewish household under those circumstances, but still I've done my fair share of having to move into other people's worlds and it's creepy how universal these experiences can get. Conclusion: when worlds meet, it's traumatic, disturbing and requires tremendous emotional strength, drawn primarily from alcohol. It's not always sweet and loving and simple like in LIT. If only.