I don’t know that I’ve seen a movie ever evoke that melancholy mood of driving an empty road at night, the streetlamps periodically illuminating your way as you’re lost in meditation and warm in the security of your vehicle -I don’t know that I’ve seen that feeling better translated than in Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s thoughtful and measured adaptation of the short story of the same name by Haruki Murakami. There doesn’t seem to be enough substance there in the plot for a three hour movie, the story of a man trying to piece together his complex feelings about his late wife with his new young driver, but Hamaguchi pulls it off without the film ever dragging. Its’ breadth does not feel inappropriate, and in fact only renders its’ careful questions and values that much bigger.
The last Murakami story to be adapted to film was Lee Chang-dong’s brilliant Burning. Drive My Car is a very different kind of story but it’s no less quietly challenging. A forty-five minute prologue gives insight into the relationship between an acclaimed theatre star turned director Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and his screenwriter wife Oto (Reika Kirishima). We see that her creative drive is directly linked to their sexual relationship, as she dictates a story to him while they make love. A canceled flight though results in him discovering an affair, and later she dies suddenly of a hemorrhage. This is all before the credits roll, surely one of the latest instances in any movie, and it might seem ridiculously indulgent to expend so much time on what’s essentially a backstory and context for the main plot. But what Hamaguchi does with this added time is acquaint the audience more thoroughly with this couple and their life. It’s necessary that we have an understanding of just what it was that Kafuku lost before beginning to explore the pain and isolation associated with that. We learn that they had had a daughter who died as a child, we learn that she had been an actress who took to writing only recently, crucially we hear the details of her story -seemingly a sexual coming-of-age drama with some deeper meaning nested inside. We’re privy to the relationship through his eyes -curiously he doesn’t confront her after the affair, and their relationship seems to continue healthily until her death -we are made to wonder as he does, why. Hamaguchi takes his time with this slice of life, building with subtlety yet gravity to the ultimate tragedy, and then leaving us to decipher it alongside Kafuku.
This portion of the film also establishes his unique theatrical character. In particular he seems fond of the European canon -he’s seen performing Waiting for Godot to a sold-out audience early in the film. And then of course there’s his love of Chekhov, and specifically Uncle Vanya. The present-day narrative, set two years later, revolves around Kafuku staging an ambitious new production of Vanya for a major international festival in Hiroshima, with a cast assembled from all over the Asian Pacific performing their parts in their respective languages: a Filipina woman as Maria, a Malaysian as Yelena, a speaking-impaired Korean performing in sign language as Sonya, and in the role of Vanya himself, Kafuku casts a young Japanese actor Kōji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), the very man with whom his wife had the affair. Why he does this is left ambiguous -perhaps it’s out of genuine talent he sees in the boy or as a memento of his wife, even if what Takatsuki represents is her infidelity. Or maybe he sees it as another way of getting to the bottom of who she really was and why she cheated.
But while this is all going on, Kafuku is paired by festival mandate with a new driver -to his chagrin, as he prefers to drive his highly expensive car himself and has a habit of reciting lines and listening to audio tracks of his wife in the other parts while doing so -another means of keeping her alive, while also an excuse to exercise frustrations through very intense dialogue. The dispassionate Misaki (Tôko Miura) proves a very skilful chauffeur though, and is more than willing to indulge his exercise, de facto replacing his wife and tempering his mood in the process. She’s very receptive, as solemn as she is, and it rubs off on Kafuku unexpectedly. During the second act, there’s honestly not as much time given over to Kafuku and Misaki’s drives together as I expected, but the relationship still manages to bloom in quiet ways as Kafuku imparts more trust in her. A major point is when they go to dinner with Kafuku’s producer (Jin Dae-young) who as it turns out is married to the mute actress Lee Yoon-a (Park Yoo-rim), and (the conflict of interest aside) they mutually bear out her personal story and philosophy. It’s Misaki’s first real connection with Kafuku’s work, her first experience with him in a non-mandated setting.
In this role, Tôko Miura is a revelation. For someone generally so reserved and unassuming and inscrutable, she is utterly entrancing, the darkness in her past palpable long before she reveals it to Kafuku on one of their evening drives. In another world this would be a breakout for her. Hamaguchi’s whole cast though is quite remarkable, from an enigmatic Kirishima to a sharp and unpredictable Okada, to a forthright Sonia Yuan as one of the chief actors. Park is a particular stand-out too, carrying much of the weight of one of the movies’ final scenes as she makes the case for more deaf actors in theatre and film. Nishijima though is the soul of the movie, it would not work at all without his subtle but deeply nuanced performance. That sad loneliness he exudes in his scenes with Miura or in casual settings, are matched by a spark of passion when working on the play or just talking about craft. And he carries well the gravity of Kafuku’s road to acceptance.
That is what his journey is really about: finding acceptance, both for himself and for the memory of Oto. He finally learns the ending to the story she was concocting, far different than he had expected, suggesting maybe a degree of self-consciousness in her unfaithful choices during their marriage, and it allows him a greater perspective on her contradictory nature. Misaki suggests Oto was both the woman he knew and the one who betrayed him, relating a similar dual aspect to her own mother, likewise a complicated figure, though more abusive. And while Misaki seems like someone who has already come to terms with her trauma, a part of it still lingers -it’s what bonds her with Kafuku. Both still love and resent these people who harmed them -it’s a matter of reconciling those things and living their lives. In the mix also is a degree of guilt over the circumstances of the deaths of Oto and Misaki’s mother -both survivors feel they had a chance to save their respective loved ones, and yet subconsciously chose not to. And that too must be confronted for them to move on.
Those who know the story will recognize that Kafuku’s situation and especially his grief in some ways mirror that of the titular character of Uncle Vanya, that depressed old patriarch clinging to lost love and full of regret for what might have been. Kafuku used to play Vanya, though he explains at one point to Takatsuki that he can’t anymore: “Chekhov is terrifying”. And yet when he is forced to take on the role due to unforeseen circumstances, he shines, is utterly brilliant. Vanya was in its’ original run famously directed by Konstantin Stanislavski, initial developer of what many now call ‘method acting’. Appropriate then that it is in experiencing a like kind of woe to Vanya, in indirectly exercising Stanislavski’s approach, that Kafuku is able to play the part to his utmost and implicitly find some closure.
It may be that the meditative mood of Drive My Car supersedes all of this, I can’t stress just how well this movie envelops you. One of the most compelling scenes is literally just two men in a car hooked on a story one of them is telling. Hamaguchi knows the power of the material he’s got, how to levy it, and he earns each minute of this three hour movie that in the end flies by with all the grace of a pristine red Saab passing you by on a solitary highway at dusk.
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