Over the weekend, I had the pleasure of watching Drive My Car (2021), directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi with Kino Clubhouse members and writer Katherine St Asaph.
I found that the film traverses languages, translations, narrative forms, and mediums of creative expression. Loosely based on Haruki Murakami’s short story Men Without Women, Hamaguchi expands the 30-page story into a three-hour film. Through its languid pacing and novelistic story structure, Drive My Car is a stark contrast to the director’s endearing women-centered dramas Happy Hour, Asako I & II, and the most recent Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy.
The film touches upon various modalities of communication in intimacy, theater, and navigating relationships in the life of theater actor Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima). Murakami’s story and Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya are two narratives running parallel in the film that resonate themes of aimlessness and hopelessness. The characters who play Sonya and Uncle Vanya are rotated throughout the film by people in Kafuku’s personal life and by actors in his directorial debut of the play. His wife is the character Sonya in the cassette recording that Yûsuke plays and practices the dialogue of Uncle Vanya while driving. Incidentally, in the midst of reciting Uncle Vanya’s dialogue, he crashes his car. Due to the accident, Yûsuke suffers from glaucoma.
Still of the character Oto Kafuku
The reality of the film in which Hamaguchi places his cast of characters encompasses the current age of meta-existence. During one of Yûsuke’s wife Oto’s (Reika Kirishima) screenplay writing-sex sessions, she looks directly to the camera; as if this first draft she is conceiving aloud is for us, the viewers. Hamaguichi’s technique of storylines folding onto one another and characters appearing as tangential interactions and then a pivotal part of the main storyline such as in Kôshi Takatsuki, a student of his late wife Oto’s screenplay productions who also had an affair with her.
Still of the characters Yûsuke and Misaki
For most of the film, the existence of Misaki Watari (Tôko Miura) is essentially in service to Yûsuke; she drives him during the span of his theater residency and does not speak unless she is spoken to. The shift in the film after Takatsuki is arrested for killing a man reflects the change in Yûsuke and Watari’s dynamic. After learning that Takatsuki is no longer available and Yûsuke must play the role of Uncle Vanya, he proposes to Watari to travel to her hometown. He sits in the front seat instead of the back. He is no longer a passenger. Now, Misaki’s story is finally told.
Still of the characters Lee Yoon-a and Yûsuke in Drive My Car
She opens up to Yûsuke about her complicated relationship with her mother. As she confesses that she accepted her mother for who she was in spite of her mental illness, Misaki asks Yûsuke if he could accept Oto for who she was as well. The film ends with Yûsuke returning back to the stage and performing Uncle Vanya, a role all too familiar to him.
Still from Abbas Kiarostami’s Ten (2002)
The influence of the late Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami is clearly present in Drive My Car. Kiarostami’s technique of long takes of conversations in cars is seen through the deep monologues situated in Yûsuke’s red car and unveil the interconnectedness between characters. Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car illuminates the persistence of living in spite of life’s uncertainties.
Comments