Doraibu mai kā
Ryusuke Hamaguchi (2021)
A long film based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, Drive My Car has two distinct parts. The boundary between them is marked by the appearance of ‘opening’ titles, about forty minutes into Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s three-hour drama, which he wrote with Takamasa Oe. Up to that dividing point, the action is set in Tokyo and mostly comprises scenes from a marriage. Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a theatre actor and director; his wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), is a television screenwriter. After Oto’s sudden death, the action moves forward two years. The rest of the film is devoted to events occurring and relationships developing during Yūsuke’s two-month residency, casting and directing a play at a festival in Hiroshima. The play is the same one in which Yūsuke was playing the title role at the time his wife died: Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.
Hamaguchi’s part one is unhurried yet incisive, and often surprising. We learn that the Kafukus, now in their forties, lost their only child when she died in infancy. We learn, too, that Oto likes to think up her screen scenarios during sex: she tells Yūsuke her ideas while they’re in bed; next morning, he recites them back to her and she starts writing things down. Yūsuke habitually prepares for roles by repeatedly listening to play texts on tape, while driving his red Saab. After a minor accident in the car, he undergoes medical tests and is diagnosed with glaucoma in his left eye; despite the condition and to his relief, he’s allowed to continue driving, at least for the time being. In an early scene, we see him performing on stage in Waiting for Godot; afterwards, Oto comes to his dressing room to introduce Kōji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), a younger actor who has appeared in her TV pieces. Sometime later, when bad weather stymies his travel plans, Yūsuke returns home unexpectedly to find Oto having sex with a young man: his face is unseen but he could be Takatsuki. Oto is too engrossed to notice her husband standing a few feet away and Yūsuke silently exits. The BBFC certificate for Drive My Car refers to ‘strong sex’ and the adjective is doubly apt: both Yūsuke’s and Oto’s bed scenes, and the brief sequence of her astride the other lover, are frankly vigorous and make a lasting impression. Nothing more is said about Oto’s adultery until she tells her husband one morning there’s something she wants to discuss when he comes home later in the day. Yūsuke decides what that something will be and delays his return: like him, the viewer is braced for a marital showdown. We also share his shock when he gets back to find Oto dead, from what is later confirmed as a brain haemorrhage.
In Hiroshima, Yūsuke is immediately unsettled when the company manager, Yuhara (Satoko Abe), and Yoon-su (Dae-young Jin), a Korean dramaturge, advise that Yūsuke can’t drive himself between the arts centre and his hotel – not because of his glaucoma but according to a standard contractual condition, introduced after a previous artist-in-residence was involved in a car crash. Yūsuke objects, even though Yuhara assures him he will have an excellent chauffeur. He compromises by letting this prospective driver, Misaki Watari (Tōko Miura), take him out in the Saab; impressed by her quiet competence, he agrees, with some reluctance, to her driving him throughout his stay. There’s a second unpleasant surprise when Takatsuki turns up at the Uncle Vanya casting session, and reads for Astrov. The young man is amazed and disconcerted when Yūsuke casts him instead as Vanya. By this point, Drive My Car’s jolting unexpectedness is beginning to wane. It’s entirely reasonable that Hamaguchi begins linking elements of the story but those links – the protagonist obliged to share his car and cede the driving seat, his wife’s suspected lover reappearing, Yūsuke learning that twenty-three-year old Misaki is the same age his daughter would now have been – are formally neat rather than thought-provoking.
Yūsuke’s conversations with Takatsuki and Misaki are more substantial. The former is keen to talk with Yūsuke on a personal as well as a professional level. When Yūsuke says he tolerated his wife having affairs with other men because he feared he might otherwise lose her entirely, Takatsuki expresses admiration for Yūsuke’s forbearance and, in the next breath, for Oto’s writing: he mentions the ending to one of her stories, which Yūsuke has never heard before. The modest, unprepossessing Misaki gradually opens up to Yūsuke about her wrong-side-of-the-tracks upbringing; he eventually asks her to take him to the place where she came from. They go on a long, exhausting journey to a snow-covered mountain landscape, where Misaki points out the spot where her family home used to be. She reveals that she left her physically and emotionally abusive mother to die in the mudslide that engulfed the house. Misaki feels persisting guilt for this; Yūsuke admits to the same for deliberately returning home late on the day that Oto died. Although these dialogues are never less than absorbing, the ironies and correspondences they bring to light make for a limited kind of screen drama.
I don’t mean to suggest that a film is successful in direct proportion to how often it takes its audience by surprise; but because Drive My Car’s first part is such an unusual combination of slow and startling, reducing the surprises makes the slowness more salient. There are still unexpected twists. It’s not until he accepts an invitation to dinner at the dramaturge’s home that Yūsuke discovers the genial Yoon-su is married to Yoon-a (Yoo-Rim Park), the mute actress Yūsuke has cast as Sonya in Vanya. It emerges that Takatsuki’s career has gone into reverse in the two years since Oto’s death, in light of accusations of sexual relations with a minor. Yūsuke is concerned by his lead actor’s volatile behaviour: when they go to a bar together, he’s shocked to see Takatsuki assault a man for taking pictures of him on his phone. This episode predicts but still doesn’t prepare Yūsuke (or the viewer) for a subsequent assault, which results in Takatsuki’s arrest for homicide. The consequence of that, however, is more predictable: Yūsuke is persuaded to step in at the eleventh hour and play Vanya again.
The early references to Uncle Vanya, when Yūsuke is doing the play in Tokyo, aren’t enough to suggest resonances between people or events in the film and in Chekhov. (When, for example, Yūsuke finds Oto with Takatsuki, it doesn’t, at the time, remind us of Vanya catching sight of Yelena embracing Astrov.) This changes in the middle part of Drive My Car, courtesy of the amount of screen time devoted to preparations for the Hiroshima production. The auditions are an especially lengthy and engrossing episode. Yūsuke doesn’t want a monolingual production and casts actors who speak Japanese, Mandarin and Tagalog, as well as Yoon-a, who performs in Korean Sign Language. (When the production is eventually staged for an audience, supertitles are projected on a screen above the set.) It’s fascinating to listen to the different language rhythms; to watch the Vanya cast members interacting with each other despite speaking in different tongues or, in Yoon-a’s case, no tongue at all; to hear Yūsuke insist that his actors ‘Just read the text’ and witness cast members’ unease with the absence of interpretive advice from their director. At least, it’s fascinating if, like me, you’re interested in theatrical processes and techniques. If you’re not, Drive My Car is liable to be a long haul.
The film becomes increasingly dependent for its emotional power on that of Uncle Vanya. While Hamaguchi’s characters aren’t neatly paired with Chekhov counterparts, there are points of connection between them, and in what is said and heard. Although Yūsuke is incomparably more reticent than Vanya, they share feelings of being betrayed by and in mourning for life and love. When Yūsuke was preparing to play Vanya in Tokyo, Oto recorded for him the whole play minus his own lines, so that he could learn them while driving. In Hiroshima, he replays, from the recording made by his late, unfaithful wife, Sonya’s distraught question to Yelena, ‘You will tell me the whole truth, won’t you?’ and Yelena’s reply, ‘Yes, of course – I think that the truth, whatever it is, is not as frightening as uncertainty’. Plain, hard-working Misaki calls to mind Sonya but in the long exchange on the site of her family home, it’s Yūsuke who virtually quotes the speech with which Sonya closes the play, as he tells Misaki that they must, in spite of their deep sorrow, go on living. When Hamaguchi follows this with the eventual performance of Uncle Vanya at the festival theatre, he majors on the finale, as Sonya embraces and consoles Vanya with her vision of a life, ‘beyond the grave’, that is ‘bright, beautiful and fine’. This is beautifully performed by Hidetoshi Nishijima and Yoo-Rim Park; the scene has real distinctiveness, thanks to the signing of Sonya’s words. But we watch it registering their meaning for Yūsuke rather than Vanya. In the end, it’s hard not to suspect Hamaguchi of piggybacking on Chekhov.
The brief postscript is puzzling. Misaki shops for groceries at a supermarket. She comes out to the car park and gets into a red car. There’s no sign of Yūsuke but a dog is waiting inside the car. (This may or may not be the same dog that Misaki made friends with when she and Yūsuke dined at the home of Yoon-su and Yoon-a.) This closing sequence, though exasperatingly cryptic, somehow revives the intriguing quality of the first forty minutes. There’s much to admire in Drive My Car. Hamaguchi and his DP Hidetoshi Shinomiya render the frequent exterior shots of Yūsuke’s car on the move down endless roads – in isolation or in traffic – both comforting and desolating (especially at nighttime). In other words, they evoke something of Yūsuke’s feelings inside the car: it’s a safe space in which he feels acute despair. In a generally strong cast, Hidetoshi Nishijima is outstanding as the subtly melancholy Yūsuke. As Misaki, Tōko Miura is consistently eloquent, particularly as a mime. Masaki Okada’s Takatsuki, from his very first appearance, has a brittle, avid quality that’s as hard to ignore as it’s grating. Yet Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s demanding, often impressive film fails to justify its 179-minute running time. Since that makes it longer than the four acts of Uncle Vanya (plus interval), you can’t help feeling short-changed.
9 January 2022
