Traces of the Flâneuse

This article critically considers the trope of the nineteenth-century flâneur/flâneuse as found in two films: Roman Holiday (William Wyler, 1953) and Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola, 2003). Both films construct a traditional narrative from the adventures of a single female protagonist as she negotiates urban space. In tracing the references to the flâneur/the flanuese as found in these two films, one can begin to map a certain trajectory of contemporary gender relations in respect to urban space from the post–World War II era to the present, as well as to understand the context in which the “city” itself is seen as a site for such transformations.