JOIN US'Drive My Car': An odyssey of loss and life
Ryusuke Hamaguchi is having a moment. Signs of an emerging voice were already evident in his breakthrough films ‘Happy Hour’ (2015) and ‘Asako I & II’ (2018). With his two releases in 2021 – ‘Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy’ (winner of the Silver Bear at Berlinale) and ‘Drive My Car’ (winner of the Oscar for Best International Feature Film and Best Screenplay at Cannes), in addition to a co-screenwriting credit on his former professor Kiyoshi Kurosawa’s film ‘Wife of a Spy’, the 43-year-old filmmaker has well and truly arrived.
‘Drive My Car’ is a freewheeling adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s thirty-page short story sharing the same title, turning it into a parable about the inscrutability and unending mystery of other people’s lives and secrets. The protagonist is a theatre actor/director Yusuke Kafuku, who loses his screenwriter wife Oto to a sudden cerebral hemorrhage.
Two years later, Yusuke arrives at a Hiroshima theatre residency to stage an experimental production of Anton Chekhov’s ‘Uncle Vanya’. He is assigned with a laconic driver named Misaki for his trusty red Saab 900, who harbors her own unresolved grief.
For complex reasons, Yusuke casts a callow, bumptious television star Takatsaki in the lead role of Vanya, partly because he had been having an affair with his late wife. A strange duel between the two grief-stricken men ensues, alongside Yusuke’s budding connection with Misaki, prompted by the fact that he likes to play a certain cassette in the car: the voice of his late wife running his lines for Vanya, akin to a communion with the dead.
Yusuke’s directing a multilingual production of Uncle Vanya with actors who speak English, Mandarin, Tagalog, Japanese, and Korean sign language. Multilingual conversations during a memorable dinner scene mirror and anticipate the clamorous dynamics of Yusuke’s adaptation.
The task Yusuke lays out for his cast is the same one that Hamaguchi lays out for his audience. Hamaguchi builds his story and characters upon the shifting, fleeting resonances between the world he films, and the world embodied within a well-known literary classic. The lengthy, Rivettian rehearsals also mirror Hamaguchi’s own unusual method to prepare actors. The idea is to have the actors memorize the rhythm of the script by reading it again and again without emotion, reducing it to an instinctive ebb and flow of sound rather than meaning.
The film creates an entire world that is absent in Murakami’s story, expounding the characters’ tragic backstories. When Yusuke and Misaki begin to open up to each other about their lives, the exposition is mostly one-sided in Murakami’s original. In Hamaguchi’s reimagination, Misaki becomes a fully fleshed-out character and recounts her traumatic past in detail.
Continuing the exploration of possibilities of scenes set in cars in films such as Cronenberg’s ‘Crash’ and ‘Cosmopolis’, Carax’s ‘Holy Motors’ and Kiarostami’s ‘Ten’, the film’s rhythms are driven by the paradoxes of automotive transport-- the sensation of being both inside and outside, moving and still at the same time. The car becomes a contemplative liminal space for Yusuke and Misaki, a heterotopia separate from geography and time, and eventually a confessional booth.
Hamaguchi is among the most ‘western’ Japanese filmmakers, and it’s no surprise that he would be attracted to Murakami, Chekhov, and a car bearing a sly anomaly, with its steering wheel on the left. He likes segmenting his films, by marking them with built-in dividers or via the use of ellipses to mystify narrative time, necessitating its three-hour runtime.
Aided by its stellar sound design and Eiko Ishibashi’s exceptional instrumental score, the film eschews the bounds of language by leaning on ambient sounds, building a nonverbal vocabulary using sounds and layered silences. The sounds of a garbage disposal factory are rendered as a lulling hum in a hypnotic scene. The noise of the titular car rumbling in the background as Misaki drives and converses with Yusuke becomes a motif that amplifies the depths of their griefs.
A common denominator in Hamaguchi’s work is an acceptance of transience in all things. With ‘Drive My Car’, the palette of emotions expands as the characters face the voids of quiet lives endured in the shadow of loss. It portrays an archipelago of lives overlapping like Venn diagrams. A narrative contraption is engineered with intricate moving parts and voluble dialogue, drawing its power from mysteries that neither speech nor plot can explain, arriving at a special kind of emotional and cinematic truth.
(The author is a cybersecurity consultant by day, moonlighting as a cinephile by night.)