If only Paul McCartney earned royalties for mental playbacks, he’d be an even bigger billionaire this Oscar season. I’m sure I’m not alone in taking the Beatle’s libidinous 1965 earworm for a spin around the cerebrum every time I see another headline about Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, the first Japanese film to be nominated for Best Picture.
But this Drive My Car, now playing on HBO Max and opening March 11 at Lake Worth Playhouse, refers to a chauffeur, and her relationship to the protagonist is agreeably void of sexual tension. In this way, it’s more Driving Miss Daisy than driving-me-crazy.
The passenger is Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a widowed Japanese actor commissioned to direct a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. He is revealed to have glaucoma in his left eye, which, in the Haruki Murakami short story from which the film is adapted, prevents him from driving his own car. In Hamaguchi’s movie, Yūsuke also has glaucoma, but it doesn’t affect his driving; his condition is little more than a red herring, one of many un-signaled left turns this circuitous narrative takes.
Instead, Yūsuke is barred from driving by the theater festival that hired him, because in a previous season, an artist drove too recklessly. Thus, the director is required to be shepherded from his island rental, an hour’s drive from the theater, every day. It’s a bit of a cumbersome conceit, perhaps the only time Drive My Car strains credulity for the sake of story, but giving in to Hamaguchi’s whims keeps spectators at attention. This is a film that’s full of surprises both picayune and seismic.
The arrangement is, initially at least, an inconvenience for Yūsuke, who cherishes a routine that has become a routine, or a crutch: listening to an audiocassette of his late wife and screenwriter Oto (Reika Kirishima) reading Uncle Vanya through the car’s speakers, with pauses for Yūsuke to recite Vanya’s lines while driving. Oto appears throughout the movie’s 40-minute prologue, set during rehearsals for a different Vanya, and the fact that he’s still exchanging dialogue with her two years later from beyond the grave prompts the question: Has the tape ever left his car? Is it his form of grief therapy, or a self-perpetuating cycle of said grief, wherein the car may be moving but he’s stuck in the same place?
Plus, he simply loves driving. His modest, 15-year-old 1987 Saab 900 Turbo is to Yūsuke what a faithful steed is to a cowboy. But left with no other choice, he takes the backseat to Misaki Watari (Tōko Miura), a Korean driver in her early 20s, who motors across Japanese roadways with an effortless elegance, and presses play on the tape whenever he asks. Misaki has a scar on her left cheek and a rough backstory. The nearer we get to opening night of Vanya, the more information leaks out, and the closer these strangers become.
Unspooling at three impeccably paced hours, Drive My Car is speckled with memorable supporting characters I’ve yet to mention. There’s Kōji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), a young screen actor who may have been Oto’s lover two years prior, and whom Yūsuke casts as Vanya — perhaps, oddly enough, as a kind of revenge. There’s Janice Chang (Sonia Yuan), a Chinese actor also cast in Vanya, who speaks Mandarin in Yūsuke’s daring polyglot production; and most sublimely, there’s Lee Yoon-soo (Jin Dae-yeon), a mute actor who conveys her lines in Korean Sign Language. When she “speaks,” we hang on every word. Were this an actual production of Vanya instead of a play-within-a-movie, it would surely be the vanguard of theater’s infinite possibilities.
In fact, despite its generally talky director, one of Drive My Car’s themes is the limits of language — how the spoken word can become superfluous as a healing modality, subordinate to a more primal human connection. The movie itself is Chekhovian — self-consciously so, which could be a slight or a compliment — as the playwright’s torments become Yūsuke’s own, and his life and art slur together like so much brackish water. Hamaguchi shows as what it’s like to wrestle with a text; Vanya is a repository for a lifetime of guilt and regret, but it’s also, for Yūsuke, a curative balm.
Having finally seen both, I prefer Hamaguchi’s other 2021 feature, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, on the strength of its economy and its wit, neither being major contributors to Drive My Car. A triptych of three separate but thematically overlapping modern tales, each carries the intellectual heft of Drive My Car in a fraction of the time.
But, as its chances of winning the Best Picture Oscar accrue with time, Drive My Car is necessary viewing — a commanding voice from one of world cinema’s most perceptive young-ish directors, a filmmaker who evokes the best of Eric Rohmer’s verbally jousting rendezvous and Jacques Rivette’s long-form ludic sprawls. Like Misaki behind the wheel of Yūsuke’s Saab, Hamaguchi glides across his cinematic canvas with total control. He’s always moving forward and waiting, with the patience of a saint, for his passengers to join him.
DRIVE MY CAR. Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi; Cast: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tōko Miura, Reika Kirishima, Park Yu-rim, Jin Dae-yeon, Sonia Yuan; in Japanese with English subtitles; Distributor: Bitters End; Not rated. Now playing on HBO Max and at O Cinema South Beach; opens Friday at Lake Worth Playhouse and and Movies of Delray.