DRIVE MY CAR (2021)

Critic No. 265

Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Written by: Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Takamasa Oe

Produced by: C&I Entertainment, Culture Entertainment, Bitters End, Nekojarashi, Quaras, Nippon Shuppan Hanbai, Bungeishunjū, L'Espace Vision, The Asahi Shimbun Company

Casts: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tōko Miura, Reika Kirishima, Masaki Okada

Music: Eiko Ishibashi

Language: Japanese

Genre: Drama

SYNOPSIS: 

After his wife's unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku, a renowned stage actor and director, receives an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. There, he begins to face the haunting mysteries his wife left behind.

REVIEW:

Drive My Car has won a bucketload of awards since its debut in competition at Cannes last year. It might have lost to Titane, but picked up the award for best screenplay. It has topped many lists of the best films of 2021, going on to be nominated for the 94th Academy Awards for Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director (first for a Japanese flick), and Best International Feature. Certainly, Drive My Car is a well-deserving, intense drama, that stirs up your thoughts deeply about confronting your own regrets and losses. 

The film kicks off focusing on an esteemed actor/director in theatre, Yusuku Kafusu (Hidetoshi Nishijima) losing his loving wife, a TV screenwriter, Oto (Reika Kirishima), to a cerebral hemorrhage. Twenty years earlier, they had lost a daughter, aged four, to illness. He takes a two-month residency at a theatre in Hiroshima. An international cast of young actors has applied to work with him on a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. One of them, Takatsuki (Masaki Okoda), is a matinee idol who also had an affairn with Oto. Putting the past behind, Kafuku casts him as Vanya in his play.

At Kafuku’s request, the theatre company also rents him a house by the sea, an hour’s drive from the theatre. He likes to listen to a tape his wife made for him, to help him memorize his lines. The theatre insists he must also use an appointed driver, Misaki (Toko Miura) who also seems to have a psychological scar that she tries to bury. The long passages in the car become the film’s secret door: a series of intimate, revealing conversations happen in the car, as the characters learn to trust each other and confront their own deep painful moments that are engraved in their hearts.

There is so much going on here, yet the director handles the film’s core themes and sweeping emotion with impeccable assurance and an at-times breathtaking sense of the poetic. Throughout, we are haunted by the stories his wife would make up after they had sex. The film begins with one of these, in a dark bedroom with pale blue twilight outside. The lighting is so lovely and mysterious, it had me arrested in the first frame. Yusuke struggles to accept Oto’s passing, and for reasons I will not disclose, he feels responsible for her death. His interactions with the cast members navigating the complexities of the play are one aspect of the purging of hidden demons he hopes to accomplish in his stint at Hiroshima.

Yes, I do feel that the film runs more than it has to and the Checkov references/rehearsal scenes get a bit too much, at least for me though I understand the metaphorical idea Ryusuke tries to anchor. But we can’t really stretch that complaint as Ryusuke presents highly relatable characters uttering solidly written dialogues that keep winning you over and over as scenes move, reminding you about your own life and pains. 

When Misaki sits behind the wheel, she somehow senses that he is struggling with something. He in turn notices that Misaki has her own psychological scars, deep wounds she rarely acknowledges while also deluding herself into believing they healed ages ago. Both connect that way and it is extremely rewarding to see their journey through their self-acceptance in the red Saab and how they both help each other to move on. My favourite scene of the film is the 15 minutes immersive conversation between Yusuke and Takatsuki about how the latter completes the ending of a story that Oto didn’t manage to reveal to her husband. The story kind of also parallels the inner demon and the flaws that Oto was struggling to fight off.

In the lead roles, Nishijima and Miura lead a solid supporting cast, evincing a connection that transcends their characters’ large age differences. Like how the film ends off with a powerful point of view, tracking shot of the road from the red Saab, Ryusuke hits the road to cathartic enlightenment in this three-hour deep, intense drama. 

VERDICT:

With nuanced performances and solid writing, ‘Drive My Car’ is a patiently moving engrossing drama about embracing the pain of love, loss, and regret which assures a gratifying, poetic journey.

CELLULOID METER- 3.75/5: