This is one of two pieces for which I was awarded the 2022 New York Film Critics Circle graduate student prize for criticism.
Late into Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s three hour behind-the-scenes drama of a production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, a struggling Takatsuki asks his director Kafuku why he isn’t the one playing Vanya. After all, it’s a role the protagonist has become famous for playing. “Chekhov is terrifying,” Kafuku tells Takatsuki over a swirling glass of whiskey at an intimate piano bar, “When you say his lines it drags out the real you. Don’t you feel it? I can’t bear that anymore.”
Hamaguchi has two films out in 2021. Both Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy and Drive My Car find Hamaguchi playing in territory familiar to anyone who’s followed the Japanese filmmaker, whose languid, literary explorations of domestic relationships and the ways identity gets splintered at the seams of life’s subtle traumas has garnered frequent comparisons to Jacques Rivette and the Left Bank French iconoclasts of the New Wave. Drive My Car, however, is particularly special, elevating the quotidian to the extraordinary in a deceptively simple story of a grieving widower directing a new play.
The renowned theater director and actor in question is played with a vulnerable steeliness by Hidetoshi Nishijima, whose boyishly cut black hair seems incongruent with lines of grief-induced aging and perpetually downtrodden eyes. Nishijima is a handsome man, and it seems clear the character has avoided the spotlight to cope with his myriad of tragedies.
The plot of Drive My Car is reliably linear for Hamaguchi, with the titular car, a two decades-old sickly-sweet colored red Saab with squeaky leather seats, bringing us from point A to point B. At point A, Kafuku and his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) share domestic bliss in a sexually active relationship in which Oto explodes with fully formed television story ideas from an orgasmic haze. Their mornings over coffee are devoted to parsing out these strange inventions that Oto herself can barely remember, while Kafuku prepares for a multi-lingual, transnational production of Becket’s Waiting for Godot. Kafuku and Oto’s intertwined and knotty love is complicated by the revelation that the late-forties couple lost a child twenty-four years ago, that they have a resigned disagreement over whether or not they should have another (he’s for it, she’s against, he won’t fight the issue), and, the minor detail that Oto has been having a continuous stream of affairs with young male ingenues on the television show for which she writes.
Oto meets an untimely, unexpected demise before the opening credits even roll, and, importantly, this tragedy happens, at least in part, because of Kafuku’s refusal to confront his beloved wife about her secrecy. The next two hours and twenty minutes constitute Point B, devoted to Kafuku, some time later, quietly wrestling with guilt and shame while directing a production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima, where he is forced into a chauffeur-client relationship with Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), a mousy twenty-four year old woman with a mysterious scar on her cheek. They slowly warm to each other and learn that both have gone through uncommon hardship; this, coupled with the strange coincidence that Watari is the same age Kafuku’s daughter would be had she never died, creates a magical bond between them, two people whose inability to move forward in life is neatly contrasted with the irony of their constant motion inside this tiny, compact automobile.
All that off-stage action interweaves into a dramatization of Kafuku’s rehearsal process of a play that he has worked on both willingly and unwillingly for several years. The production is set in period-specific Russia as the play warrants, but, like the production of Godot, the actors come from a variety of linguistic backgrounds and all speak their mother tongue. And, in his many car rides, Kafuku listens to a cassette tape which has his late wife speaking all of the lines from the play except Vanya, made years ago for the director when he was playing the role himself, thus creating a bizarre, unnerving connection between Kafuku and the ghosts of his past. Hamaguchi, not content to settle on this communication along the thin veil between the living and the dead, carefully weaves in lines of Chekhov to correspond thematically with the off-stage drama. Vanya, a text about sexual infidelity, fading glory and the crumbling bones that make up a home, provide an eerie and solid foundation upon which Hamaguchi explores multiple modes of catharsis within the art-making process. This is the kind of movie that draws you into its steady, even pace; you may find yourself still in motion with the ride long after the final credits. It is, like Kafuku says about his driver’s impeccable driving ability, unlikely you’ll even realize you’re on the journey at all, so smooth is its mechanics.
So what is the “real you” that Kafuku is so afraid of becoming? Drive My Car’s magic is in elucidating a process of redemption and self-actualization for multiple characters at once. Kafuku’s avoidance of the realness transforms into a pursuit of the same, and, while Hamaguchi stops short of hollow forgiveness, he shows us that staring down what we wish we had done or said is the only path forward to dignity. Though Drive My Car is slavishly devoted to the kind of long, patient conversations we all might have on untethered journeys on the highway, something magical happens anyway: the ability to say goodbye to those we left behind. Flesh and guts and bones, all.