Drive My Car (2021)
Begins streaming March 2 on HBO Max.
In Drive My Car the writer-director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi gives the script, co-authored with Takamasa Oe, a winding, twisty expansiveness. Watching it is a bit like being on a road trip. He shoots concisely, cuts unshowily. There’s nothing swift here. You experience every minute. The shocks, when they come, jolt. But what’s most impressive about Hamaguchi’s inspired directing is that all 2 hours and 59 minutes of his movie matter. I doubt that by the end you’ll wish anything had been left out.
Some have been wary about the movie’s length, but I wasn’t bored for a moment. I was thrilled and unsettled. This movie gets as close to a masterpiece as I ever dare to hope for. Hardly any of it is predictable. It constantly undermines expectations. I inched forward apprehensively, much as its characters do, waiting for I knew not what.
Which is another way of saying that this movie is heavily, indeed ominously, plot driven. Events gradually unearth the meanings that the characters can’t bring themselves to face. There’s no way forward but through the maze. Strap in.
Set in contemporary Japan and based on a short story by the novelist Haruki Murakami, the tale centers on Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a distinguished middle-aged stage actor and director in Tokyo. He’s contentedly, or so it seems, married to Oto (Reika Kirishima), a television scriptwriter.
We meet them as they dream up, during sex and post-coitally, the plot twists of one of Oto’s projected scripts. Together they make up stories, often erotically charged, out of thin air. In exchange for the help Yusuke provides Oto in devising her scripts, she records on tape the dialogue in the plays Yusuke appears in, allowing him to listen to them in his car while rehearsing his lines.
At the TV production office where Oto works, she introduces Yusuke to a handsome young TV actor, Koshi Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), who expresses his admiration for the older actor’s work. Along with the praise Koshi offers, we see a faintly mocking gleam in his eye.
One day when Yusuke unexpectedly returns home he finds Oto, who’s unaware her husband is watching, having intense sex with a young man, whose face we don’t see. Strangely, Yusuke doesn’t confront the pair, and quietly leaves the apartment. Could the young man have been Koshi?
Sometime later, Oto asks Yusuke if they can have a talk. She sounds serious, so, hurrying out the door, he promises they’ll talk that very evening. Tragically, he returns home to find that Oto has suffered a brain hemorrhage and collapsed. He calls an ambulance, but she dies without regaining consciousness.
These perplexing, tantalizing events serve as a prologue.
Two years pass and Yusuke is still deep in mourning (he and Oto had a child who died of pneumonia). He’s invited to direct a multicultural production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at a theater festival in Hiroshima. He drives his beloved red Saab 900 to the city. As part of his contract, he’s assigned a driver to see that he gets safely between his hotel and the auditions and rehearsals at the theater. He uses the commuting time, an hour in each direction, to play tapes of Oto reading the lines of Uncle Vanya. After two years, he still can’t do without hearing her voice (oto in Japanese means “sound”).
His driver, Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), is a taciturn 23-year-old woman who happens to be extremely good at her job. She easily masters the Saab and gives Yusuke a trip so comfortable he tells the theater administrators who hired her that the ride is always “very smooth and doesn’t feel heavy at all. She speeds up and slows down so smoothly, I hardly feel gravity. Sometimes I forget I’m in a car.”
Slowly, these easeful trips turn the vehicle into a confessional. On their faces we can see Yusuke and Misaki thinking: The car is moving. Are we? We wait and watch for revelations. But they’re buried deep. Both the seasoned actor and the disquietingly competent driver need time, and pressure, to fully open up.
The Vanya auditions and rehearsals, too, conceal suppressed feelings. Who should show up in Hiroshima to audition but Koshi, the young actor Oto introduced to Yusuke two years before? We see flickering across Yusuke’s face an alarming question: Two years before, did he stumble in on Oto having sex with this young man, whose face he wasn’t able to see?
Is this two-year-old deception what Yusuke pokes at when he perversely casts Koshi as the middle-aged Vanya, startling the young actor? The two men circle one another, their carefully hidden pasts edging into the light.
Just as unsettling for Yusuke is his growing attachment to the mysterious Misaki. She speaks so infrequently, and her driving is so rigidly dutiful, that finally Yusuke can’t keep from trying to get that reserved face to reveal some – any – genuine emotion.
Her past is far bleaker than he or we could have guessed, and when she reveals it, it’s shattering. Here the movie reaches its core. So different in background and temperament, Yusuke and Misaki are caught in the same trap of disavowing the questions they can’t answer. They’ve refused even to keep asking them. This movie is didactic in the best sense. It ever so circumspectly suggests that we not walk away from the questions we keep walking away from.
The pace is disarmingly leisurely. It’s not until 40 minutes in that the opening credits appear. When does the actual journey begin? When and where will it end? The movie’s unhurried formalism forces you to question at every point exactly what juncture the characters have reached on their paths of self-discovery. What’s even harder to unravel is the way the discoveries both sting and heal, first one, then the other.
The actors mostly underplay. The revelations are more searing for being spoken most often just above a whisper. Nishijima holds Yusuke’s sadness firmly in check. Steely pride as a cloak for sorrow is hard for an actor to portray. Yet Nishijima pulls off that taut balancing act the whole movie long. As Yusuke remarks: “Those who survive keep thinking about the dead in one way or another.”
Miura steadily, and somehow expressively, maintains Misaki’s frozen façade, until the practiced driver can’t hide any longer. Unlike her passenger, a trained actor, Misaki can’t easily make her face malleable. It’s a nearly unreadable mask throughout the movie’s first half, giving only hints about the aching woman behind it. Emotional rigidity, like careful driving, is a skill. So, until the movie’s second half Yusuke’s attempts to draw Misaki into conversation are politely, roundly, deflected.
It’s only as Yusuke continues to play the tapes of Oto’s voice that Misaki begins to want to speak out herself. She, after all, isn’t dead. She’s right there. Why should confinement to a car lock them both in secrecy? As Yusuke begins to voice his misgivings about the play he’s rehearsing, Misaki’s past begins to slip out. How did she learn to drive so well? Grim necessity, she confesses, is the reason. Her letting go begins.
Okada’s Koshi is a frightened, arrogant hothead who’s sneaking by as a handsome TV actor. He resents Yusuke for pushing him into playing Vanya, a role for which he’s too young and which he fears will draw audience ridicule. Is Yusuke punishing him? Does Yusuke suspect the young man’s affair with Oto?
But when the two men share a cab, they drop their pretenses and the animus between them is overwhelmed. Surprisingly, underneath, they share a sadness deeper than any sexual jealousy or professional rivalry. They’re both actors in search of a real-life role to play. And both are smart enough to sense the ghosts of the past making their entrance. It’s perhaps the movie’s most rending scene, astonishingly well-acted.
I urge you, as you watch these people slowly drop their pretenses, to remain patient. Don't be in a hurry. If you let them roll over, under and through you, they could haunt your dreams. They haunt mine.