Drive My Car is a long film, but possessed of such quiet intensity one barely notices the time slipping by. Another distraction is that the credits don’t appear until more than half an hour into the movie. By then we’ve stopped expecting them and they come as a surprise. Suddenly it seems that everything we’ve watched so far was only a preamble.
That long overture introduces us to Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a middle-aged actor and theatre director, and his wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), a scriptwriter. The peculiar nature of Oto’s inspiration is that she gets her story ideas during sex, which seems to stimulate her imagination as well as her body. The couple discuss her plots post-coitus, like other screen couples might share a cigarette.
When a flight is cancelled and Yusuke has to return home unexpectedly, he finds Oto in bed with a young actor, Takatsuki (Masaki Okada). He says nothing and beats a swift retreat. Their relationship goes on, as usual. But as Yusuke is leading up to a serious talk with Oto, she dies of a cerebral haemorrhage, leaving a void in his life.
After the titles have rolled, we learn that two years have passed and Yusuke has been commissioned to produce a play in Hiroshima. He drives there in his old red Saab, a European car with the steering wheel on the left-hand side. Never has the identification between man and car been portrayed in such an oblique fashion. We usually think of cars as an expression of machismo, but Yusuke’s Saab is a quaint, old-fashioned beast still equipped with a cassette deck. In his choice of vehicle one learns a lot about the owner.
Yusuke has asked for lodgings an hour’s drive from the city, because an essential part of his preparation is to run through a recording of a play, over and over, on the car stereo. It’s Oto’s voice he listens to, while adding his own lines from memory.
The organisers tell him their insurance policy doesn’t allow him to do his own driving. Instead, they have assigned him a professional driver, a young woman named Misaki (Toko Miura). Yusuke finds this irritating and disruptive at first. He is abrupt with the silent Misaki, but little by little he comes to appreciate the quality of her driving, and gets to know her better.
Meanwhile the auditions and rehearsals creep forward. The play is Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, the drama in which Yusuke was performing when Oto died. His radical method as a director is to hire actors from different countries, allowing them to speak their lines in their own language, translated as surtitles for the audience. He even hires a deaf Korean actress, Yoon-a (Yoo-ri Park), who signs her lines. Only later does he find out that Yoon-a is married to one of the producers, Yoon-su (Dae-young Jin), but that doesn’t faze him at all.
For the role of Vanya he hires Takatsuki, the actor with whom Oto was having an affair. As director, Yusuke enjoys a position of power over his rival, although – in typically Japanese fashion – he feels an obligation to act honourably. The main problem is that Takatsuki, headstrong and impulsive, seems determined to wreck his own career.
Little by little, Yusuke begins to talk to Misaki, and gets her to tell him her own story. Their daily drives become a two-way confessional and a bond is formed between an unlikely couple from different generations and different parts of Japan. There’s an element of father and daughter, but like most of the human connections in this movie, it’s a relationship of emotional depth and psychological complexity.
Drive My Car has already collected an impressive haul of prizes and accolades, and is being described as “this year’s Parasite”. Like that landmark feature it has been nominated for both Best Picture, and Best International Feature at this year’s Academy Awards. Ryusuke Hamaguchi has received further nominations as director and screenwriter.
It’s a huge step forward for the Academy that films from a non-English-speaking background are finally receiving the recognition they deserve. Even this early in the year it’s clear that Drive My Car is one of the highlights of 2022 – a movie that stays lodged in the mind and gets better upon reflection. Any summary of the plot is quite inadequate to convey the power and subtlety of Hamaguchi’s writing.
Based on a story by Haruki Murakami, the film echoes the sparse, unsentimental nature of this author’s prose, but adds layers of complexity, mainly through dialogue. Although Yusuke is rarely off screen, he remains a puzzle, perhaps to himself as well as us, a strange mixture of passivity and single-mindedness. As a director he’s a commanding figure, but totally at sea in his own life. If he has secrets they are never given up wthout a struggle. The story is a slow voyage of self-discovery, with Misaki playing the role of pilot.
Drive My Car is a film about grief, pain, guilt, shame, and the interface between art and life. Years after Oto has died, Yusuke is still mourning. He keeps her memory alive by listening to her voice reciting the lines from Uncle Vanya. If he declines to play the lead role, which he knows by heart, it’s because he feels that when an actor immerses himself in the character, “it drags out the real you”. The implication is that art acts as a shield against an implacable reality.
By asking Takatsuki to play Uncle Vanya, Yusuke is addressing his fear that the younger man had usurped the leading role in his wife’s affections. It’s his conversations with Misaki that allow him to realise he’s not alone in harbouring dark feelings of regret towards the past.
It’s a miracle that Drive My Car can sustain so many ambiguities wthout the storyline ever becoming tangled. There’s so much going on this tale it would take a very long essay to gather all the threads. For instance, much could be said about the way the story relates to Uncle Vanya – a play about disillusionment, and becoming resigned to life. The critics have never agreed as to whether or not that translates into happiness.
On many occasions the lines of the play seem to comment on the action of the film, as an ironic chorus. One wonders if Hamaguchi is emphasising the relevance of art to life, or portraying it as a refuge for a tortured soul.
Drive My Car
Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Written by Ryusuke Hamaguchi & Takamasa Oe, after a story by Haruki Murakami
Starring: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Toko Miura, Reika Kirishima, Masaki Okada, Satoko Abe, Jin Dae-yeon, Park Yu-rim
Japan, rated MA 15+, 179 mins
Published in the Australian Financial Review, 12 February, 2022