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 (032422)
Haruki Murakami’s short story “Drive My Car,” included in his 2014 collection
Men Without Women, contains a whole world of grief and human connections in
around 30 pages. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s screen adaptation hews close to the source
material, though it could be accused of taking the scenic route. But its
deviations supply a necessary byway that emphasizes what literature cannot
accurately capture: time. Drive My Car runs just about three hours; the opening
credits don’t even appear until the 45-minute mark. That’s an intentional choice
by the Japanese filmmaker, who understands the experiential value of inhabiting
the same space for an extended period. The effect is almost palpable between
characters who share a theatrical stage or quietly ride together in a car for
hours, whereas, in literature, the prose can only convey the idea of time. The
implied intimacy in text form is experienced in real time as the filmmaker
renders long, immersive shots of his characters sharing the same space. Granted,
the film’s shots don’t last for hours, but the minutes-long takes feel like an
eternity in the most rewarding ways.
Hamaguchi’s string of festival success since 2015’s Happy Hour has made him a
name to watch. He’s been making features for two decades at this point, but he’s
only started to emerge on the international scene recently with Asako I & II
(2018) and The Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021).
Drive My Car seems to signal his breakout moment, earning him several prizes at
Cannes and many other awards from critical associations worldwide. No
wonder—it’s the most engrossing and human film that I’ve seen from him so far,
and its patient storytelling is only matched by its temporal scope. There’s a
subtle but rigid formal agenda at work here, complete with unassuming camera
placement, minimal score by Eiko Ishibashi, and enveloping shot lengths that
might test impatient viewers. However, Hamaguchi’s interest in dramatic romances
enlivens his understated aesthetic.
The script by Hamaguchi and co-writer Takamasa Oe opens in Tokyo, showcasing the
marriage between actor and theater director Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and
screenwriter Oto (Reika Kirishima). Their relationship is complex from the
start. Oto receives her best creative ideas in a trancelike state during sex,
and when the actual writing begins, Yusuke helps her remember what poured out of
her during the act. That’s not the only unconventional aspect of their marriage:
she’s also unfaithful. She has sexual relationships with other men—a fact that
Yusuke accommodates, probably because they lost a daughter some years earlier
and need each other. When Yusuke drives to and from work in his red Saab (which
seems to be the only red car on the road), he listens to a cassette tape Oto
made for him. She reads lines from Chekov’s Uncle Vanya, leaving silences where
Yusuke inserts his performance. It helps him memorize every role through dogged
repetition. But returning home late one night, Yusuke finds Oto dead from a
cerebral hemorrhage on the floor.
Some people may believe that time heals all wounds, but two years after Oto’s
death, Yusuke still wrestles with grief and questions about the nature of his
marriage. Listening to Oto’s voice on the tape each day presents a nagging
reminder—especially as he performs lines about infidelity. Then, when producers
ask him to mount his production of Chekhov’s play in Hiroshima, they have a
strange requirement: ever since a car accident a while back, directors must be
driven to and from work by the theater’s driver. Enter the twenty something
Misaki (Toko Miura), an inward and stone-faced professional who serves as his
chauffeur. Though she doesn’t emerge from her shell until the film’s final
third, the relationship between Yusuke and Misaki inhabits a curious, reliable,
and ultimately truthful space. She waits for him during his long days of
rehearsal, and when he’s ready, she delivers a smooth ride home, allowing him to
focus with as much ponderousness as he requires. But what begins as discomfited
silence interrupted by Oto’s voice on the cassette gradually reveals something
deeper between them.
Of course, Murakami’s choice of Uncle Vanya isn’t arbitrary. Plenty of parallels
exist between Chekov’s play and the characters in Drive My Car, especially in
terms of acting theory. For starters, Stanislavski, who encouraged his actors to
have an inner experience that would appear in their physical actions on stage,
directed the play’s first production. Yusuke’s production attempts something
similar through a postmodern theatrical conceit. His actors speak various
languages—including Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, and Korean Sign Language—and he
projects their translated dialogue onto a screen above the stage. They perform
in their respective languages, requiring them to know the text so thoroughly
that their responses must come from within, removing all artifice. Yusuke tells
an actor that Chekov’s lines “drag the real out of you.” The same is true of the
film, which finds Yusuke forced to engage with the play and his life in ways he
has avoided since his wife’s death.
The play’s rehearsals lead to drama between Yusuke and the actors, including the
handsome Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), a spontaneous performer who also happened to
bed Oto. Although somewhat convenient in storytelling terms, Takatsuki’s
presence and the conflict between him and Yusuke doesn’t go as expected, even
after the director casts Takatsuki in the age-inappropriate role of Uncle Vanya—perhaps
as a kind of revenge to test his wife’s lover in a role beyond his skill.
Instead, the film uses Takatsuki as a fork in the road, causing Yusuke and
Misaki to veer away into their own realm. Inside the intimate space of the car,
they share mutual confessions that unravel the complicated people in their
lives. For Yusuke, he finds a way of reconciling Oto’s behavior and their
dynamic as “genuine.” For Misaki, she also learns to accept that some part of
her troubled and abusive mother loved her.
Nishijima and Miura give superb performances comprised of a transfixing
stillness that contrasts the onstage performances. Hamaguchi matches their
outward calm with simple shots inside cars and long passages of the stage
rehearsals. If the cinematography by Hidetoshi Shinomiya doesn’t call attention
to itself, specific images stand out—such as Yusuke and Misaki preserving the
sanctity of the car by holding their cigarettes out of the sunroof, or the stark
appearance of the red car against snow in the final scenes. But all this outward
control is enriched by how it deepens the characters when their carefully
constructed façade cracks. For example, when Yusuke must play Uncle Vanya on
stage, he’s overcome by the role and its relation to his life. As he tells an
actor, “The text is questioning you. If you listen and respond, it will speak to
you.” The same realization occurs during those long car rides, though in a
different way—both Yusuke and Misaki have nothing to do but think about their
late wife and mother, respectively.
But as a line from Murakami’s short story, which Hamaguchi and Oe carry over to
the film, says, “If we hope to truly see another person, we have to start by
looking within ourselves.” If Uncle Vanya’s characters find themselves
reflecting on their unfulfilled and dissatisfying lives until a miserable
conclusion, Drive My Car offers a note of optimism by allowing Yusuke and Misaki
to find some way of addressing their failures, forgiving themselves for their
perceived crimes, and moving forward. Though they don’t talk much at first,
their hours together speak volumes, giving way to clarity. Hamaguchi’s film
hinges on how two people connect; Yusuke and Misaki prompt each other to look
inward and better accept the place others have in their lives. It’s an
introspective film that emphasizes the importance of the road ahead instead of
going around in the same circles every day, asking unanswerable questions of
people who cannot respond.
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