The long, meandering journey of Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car to four Oscar nominations mirrors the long, meandering journey that the Japanese filmmaker takes viewers on over the course of three hours. It starts in a quiet, unassuming place, makes some unexpected but delightful stops along the way, and ends on a surprisingly hopeful note for the future. The movie takes its time building its narrative and defining its characters, and it requires patience to appreciate its many virtues.
It takes 40 minutes just to get to the opening credits of Drive My Car, which function like a bit of punctuation tying off the extended prologue. In that opening segment, theater director Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) discovers that his TV writer wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) has been cheating on him, and while he's away from home avoiding a confrontation, she suffers a cerebral hemorrhage and dies. Two years later, he still hasn't quite processed his grief, but he's attempting to move on professionally, directing a production of the play he was working on when his wife died, Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.
Yusuke's version of Uncle Vanya is a unique staging that stars actors of various nationalities all performing in their native languages, and much of Drive My Car focuses on the rehearsal process for this complicated endeavor. Yusuke is invited to a cultural center in Hiroshima to put on his play, where he discovers that one of the actors auditioning is Koji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), one of Oto's secret lovers. Yusuke casts Koji in the title role, despite expectations that he would play the role himself.
For liability reasons, the cultural center insists that Kafuku employ the services of a driver while he's working on the play, so he relinquishes control of his vintage red Saab 900 Turbo to Misaki Watari (Toko Miura). At first, he largely ignores the young woman, spending their long drives listening to a recording of Uncle Vanya made by his late wife, with spaces for him to fill in the title character's lines. But they gradually form a connection, united by shared trauma and a quiet appreciation for artistic beauty.
Their bond is strengthened during a subdued but deeply affecting dinner scene in the middle of the movie, when Yusuke and Misaki are invited to the home of a Korean couple who are both involved in the Uncle Vanya production. Through simple, understated exchanges, Hamaguchi provides insights into Yusuke's working methods, delivers a rebuke from one of the play's stars, probes Japanese-Korean cultural relations, and reveals Yusuke's true appreciation for his taciturn driver. It's the kind of scene that slowly sneaks up on you, revealing its cumulative power only at the end, with a sudden rush of emotion.
Drive My Car, which is freely adapted from elements of several Haruki Murakami short stories, features multiple scenes like that, seemingly mundane events that provide much-needed release for the characters. The logistics of putting together the multilingual play are fascinating, and Hamaguchi alternates those procedural details with personal moments between characters, as Yusuke alternately confronts and consoles Koji, in his complex, halting efforts to understand and accept his late wife's proclivities.
There's a lot of talk in Drive My Car, which values language as much as Chekhov did, but Hamaguchi also creates some hauntingly beautiful images, and Yusuke's distinctive car itself becomes a sort of supporting character and central symbol. Like the movie, it's a lovely piece of craftsmanship that demands care and dedication, and rewards those who give it their full attention. ♦
DRIVE MY CAR
