Revelling In Ryusuke Hamaguchi's "Drive My Car"
Japan, Existential Truths, and a Red Saab 900 Turbo
This review contains plot spoilers
The line at the Nuart stretched for more than three blocks for last Saturday afternoon’s showing of “Drive My Car,” which featured a Q&A with director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Having missed Hamaguchi’s previous night’s appearance at the Aero, I was determined to make this one, however long it took to get in. Eventually I gained entry and found a seat in the front row of a packed house. For the next three hours, I was transfixed: “Drive My Car” is a film like no other, Japanese or not, and a first-rate achievement. (It was recently named Best Film of 2021 by the New York Film Critics’ Circle, and one of the 10 Best Films of 2021 by the New York Times.)
Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, “Drive My Car” is the story of an actor-director called Yusuke Kafuku* (Hidetoshi Nishijima). In the film’s lengthy preamble, we see Yusuke and his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), an actress turned screenwriter, at work and in their private life. Both in their late forties, the Kafukus are enviably attractive and prosperous, with successful careers, a beautiful red Saab 900 Turbo, and a posh duplex apartment in central Tokyo. They also seem passionately in love, despite Oto’s habit of taking lovers on the side and Yusuke’s tacit acceptance of it. When his overseas flight is cancelled, Yusuke returns home unexpectedly to find Oto and Koji, the young star of her latest movie, having sex. Yusuke slips out unnoticed and never confronts Oto. We soon learn that the couple’s only daughter died at four; as a result of that trauma both Yusuke and Oto gave up their movie careers. Yusuke turned to theater as an actor and director, while Oto stopped acting in favor of writing. Nearly two decades later and soon after the incident with Koji, their marriage ends with Oto’s abrupt and unexpected death.
Two years later, Yusuke heads south to begin a two-month residency at a theater in Hiroshima. There he will direct his signature multilingual production of “Uncle Vanya” with an international cast, each actor speaking in his native language while supertitles run above the stage. Much to his dismay, Yusuke is informed that for the duration of his stay he will not be allowed to drive his car; instead, a chauffeur will. The chauffeur is a tomboyish 23-year-old called Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), who despite her youth turns out to be a superb driver.
Among the actors who audition for “Uncle Vanya” is the infamous Koji (Masaki Okada) whose career has stalled after a sex scandal. Despite Koji’s youth Yusuke casts him as Vanya, and rehearsals get underway with lengthy table reads in Japanese, Korean, Chinese, Tagalog and Korean Sign Language. Each morning, Misaki drives Yusuke in the Saab from his house on a nearby island to the theater, and back again in the evening. Depite their mutual reticence, the driver and director develop a rapport, bonding over the car, their loneliness and tragic pasts. When the play is thrown into chaos, the two take a long road trip north and catch a ferry to Hokkaido. There they visit Misaki’s village and the wreckage of her childhood home.
I’m not sure that “Uncle Vanya” mirrors “Drive My Car”, apart from a shared regard for life’s hopelessness. Chekov’s play is all about family, which Yusuke and Misaki neither have nor seem to want. And Yusuke’s multi-lingual production isn’t a metaphor for the main characters’ communication difficulties, since all are Japanese. Whatever Murakami had in mind, the appeal of the movie isn’t Chekovian but visual and automotive.
Perhaps because Japanese films are filmed mostly on soundstages and back lots, they rarely feature sweeping vistas. Until the Japanese New Wave of the 1960’s, it was rare to shoot on location, which is what makes the shots of Ginza in “Tokyo Story” so exciting. Even in contemporary Japanese films, exterior shots tend to be close range and familiar: urban or suburban neighborhoods, and the occasional temple or office building. But “Drive My Car” makes great use of drone photography, showing us not only Tokyo’s vast cityscape but the natural beauty beyond it—the lush vegetation that covers everything that hasn’t been paved over, the green mountains and blue ocean. Just as striking (and for me, nostalgic) are the country’s superb highways, roads, bridges and tunnels—the kind of infrastructure that America hasn’t enjoyed since the 1960s. At one point, Misaki takes Yusuke on a tour of Hiroshima’s waste managment plant, where she used to drive a garbage truck. A glass and steel complex right out of “Gattica”, its scale and modernity are breathtaking.
“Drive My Car” is also the first Japanese road movie, as far as I know. Yusuke’s sleek red Saab 900 is the film’s catalyst, refuge and repository of stories, cutting thorough a large swath of Japan like a blade. After the film, Hamaguchi talked of getting Murakami’s permission to change the car’s color, on the grounds that red would pop against the blue-green exteriors as the story’s yellow Saab couldn’t. It was a brilliant choice. The red Saab now resides in my mind’s eye, and if it weren’t a car it would deserve a Best Supporting Actor nomination.
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*Kafuku, a name so unusual that Misaki remarks on it, can be written two ways in Japanese. The first character means blessing, wealth or fortune, while the second means calamity, evil or curse. Though Yusuke’s name uses the former kanji, his life contains elements of the second. Kafuku is the second Murakami character whose name evokes Kafka—the other is Kafka Tamura of Kafka on the Shore—and that’s no accident.