Drive My Car: A Tender, Tough Road Trip Via a Haruki Murakami Tale
By Liam Lacey
Rating: A
Some relationships have the frustrating urgency of unsolvable puzzles; no matter how you approach them, you hit an impasse.
Such is the case in the Japanese movie Drive My Car, a novelistic character study of an emotionally repressed middle-aged theatre actor and director, Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) who grieves for his late, loving but serially unfaithful wife.
The best screenplay winner at Cannes this year and Japan’s Oscar nominee, the film by Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi (Asako I and II, Wheel of Fortune, Fantasy) has been getting some serious best-of-year consideration.
Certainly, it’s a welcome call-back to grownup movies of 1960s and 70s, about adult intimacy and meaning-of-life concerns. Shot with crisp, unfussy clarity inside a car or in boardroom offices and the streets of the modern urban Japan, it’s a drama about the intricate ways love, performance, and work merge into each other.
In its original form, Drive My Car came from Haruki Murakami’s short story collection, Men Without Women. While switching locations and adding and altering some characters, Hamaguchi and co-writer Takamasa Oe have unpacked and expanded Murakami’s evocative character sketch into a finely tuned, emotionally complex, three-hour movie.
As was the case of the 2018 South Korean psychodrama Burning, Murakami’s deceptively casual short stories seem particularly amenable to this kind of exploration and expansion. Key to the expansion is the extensive use of a play that Yûsuke is preparing, Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, a drama of regret about different men in love with the same woman. There’s enough of the play quoted in the film that Chekhov should probably receive a co-writing credit.
As Drive My Car starts, Yûsuke is a successful actor/director, specializing in multilingual productions, with sur-titles, of canonical modern European dramas. He’s currently onstage with Waiting for Godot while preparing for Uncle Vanya.
His wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima) is a former actress turned TV writer who gets ideas for stories during their sexual encounters. One is a story about a teenaged girl who breaks into the house of a boy she has a secret crush on, stealing and leaving tokens. Part of the wife’s secret life involves her grief for a lost child but none of this is presented as a key to her behaviour. Their relationship, like many couples, depends on a shared area of experience and large expanses of terra incognito.
Yûsuke and Otto discuss and develop her story ideas as they drive together in his flashy little red Saab. Yûsuke also uses his car as a rehearsal space to listen to cassette tapes of plays he’s working on, practicing his lines to pre-recorded tapes in which his wife reads the other parts.
One day, upset at surreptitiously witnessing his wife having sex with a young actor and leaving the scene, he has a minor car accident. In the medical checkup after the accident, he learns he has glaucoma, a literal blind spot to go with his emotional one.
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Then, at about the 40-minute mark of the film, Otto dies suddenly. The film, even more unexpectedly, shows its opening credits. All this has been prologuing Yûsuke’s new life as a widower and the story of how, through his relationship with one of his late wife’s lovers — and in conversations with his taciturn young woman chauffeur — he finds a kind of closure, or at least an acceptance of the mystery of other people.
Two years after the funeral, he arrives in the city of Hiroshima for a theatre festival to direct a multilingual production of Uncle Vanya in Japanese, English, Mandarin, and Tagalog. But a deaf actress as Sonja, signing in Korean sign language, leads to some seriously challenging rehearsals. Yûsuke, a quiet but no-nonsense director, insists that Chekhov’s text will eventually reveal all.
Personally, though, he feels that Chekhov is too “emotionally dangerous” for him to perform. He casts one of his wife’s young lovers, a recently disgraced young actor named Koshi (Masaki Okada) in the title role wearing middle-aged make-up as a kind of vengeance.
He encourages the young man, who admires him and also still carries a torch for Otto, to confess his insecurities. The kid’s a ruffian but not without insight about Yûsuke’s oddly masochistic mission both in producing the play and casting someone who was close to his late wife.
During the extended rehearsal period, Yûsuke is provided with a driver, Misaki (Tôko Miura), a blunt 23-year-old chain-smoking young woman from the country whose only skill is driving. She’s compelled to listen, along with Yûsuke, to the voice of his late wife reading the dialogue of Uncle Vanya, the backseat conversations between the director and the young actor, Koshi.
Eventually, as Yûsuke moves from the back seat to the front, he confesses his consuming doubts and regrets about his late wife Was he dishonest with his wife by not confronting her about her infidelities? If so, would that have brought them closer or driven them apart?
In the film’s final section, Misaki’s backstory is also revealed, and arguably, in this unquestionably long movie, it risks feeling like one too many tugs on the same chain of regrets and compromises, though it serves a purpose.
Her story doesn’t tie neatly with Yûsuke’s story or with Uncle Vanya, but is a reminder that every form of work is a kind of performance, and every drama is, potentially, a model for how to live — or fail to live —our lives.
Drive My Car. Directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Written by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe, adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami. Starring Hidetoshi Nichijima, Masaki Okada, Tôko Miura, and Reika Kirishima. Screening at TIFF Bell Lightbox beginning November 26 and in theatres across Canada in subsequent weeks.