Mark Reviews Movies: DRIVE MY CAR

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Review by Mark Dujsik | December 9, 2021

Of all the mundane and everyday activities that people take for granted and don't think about too deeply, driving might also serve as the simplest, most efficient, and most recognizable metaphor for control. That's what the act almost certainly seems to represent in Drive My Car, co-writer/director Ryusuke Hamaguchi's patient and subtle study of lost souls, trying to find some peace, some meaning, and, yes, some form of control within artistic creativity and the process of grieving.

Our protagonist is Yusuke Kafuku (Hideotoshi Nishijima), an actor and director for the stage who, among his other endeavors and ambitions, likes to drive. At first, there's nothing too special to it—or, at least, nothing special that we can observe. He drives himself and his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) to work every day.

That's it, until a certain point in the film's extended prologue, which allows us the time to consider these characters, their situations, their pasts, and their relationships before everything is upended. The story proper, in fact, doesn't really begin for about 40 minutes, when the opening credits finally roll. Hamaguchi and co-screenwriter Takamasa Oe, adapting a short story by Haruki Murakami, don't waste any of that time, but they certainly savor what the relaxed pace and expanded storytelling allow.

Yusuke runs and is part of a theatrical troupe, which performs famous plays with a bit of a twist. The cast members of these productions come from various parts of Asia, outside of Yusuke's native Japan. The actors speak their lines in their own respective tongues, and a giant screen above the stage projects translations to assorted languages. Great drama, whether it be the Irish resident of Paris Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot or Russian Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, possesses no barrier of nationality or language. It communicates on a deeper, more foundational level, and Yusuke sets out to prove that.

Communication in his personal life, though, isn't as clear. Oto writes dramas for television, and there's a bit of a quirk to her writing process. She devises stories during and after sex. There's a scene in which the climax of one tale arrives as she, well, is in the act of climaxing. It would be exclusively amusing, if not for how much we learn about her, her pain, and her relationship with Yusuke—and what we don't learn, for that matter, which becomes the story's major, mostly unspoken sticking point.

The two had a daughter, who died at the age of 4, and the only sign of that information is the couple's attendance at a memorial service. There is so much that these two cannot or will not say to each other. Hamaguchi seems to be building up to some moment of a breakthrough for the couple, and the tension of that, as palpable as it is with the time the filmmaker permits, ultimately makes the absence of an answer all the more potent.

The other details are vital, and they are as follows: After a festival is cancelled, Yusuke discovers Oto having sex with another man, says nothing, leaves the couple's apartment unnoticed, and drives to a hotel near the airport, where he pretends to be at the festival while on a video call with his wife. They say nothing for weeks, and then, one morning, Oto says she has something to tell Yusuke. He leaves for work and, upon returning home, finds an unconscious Oto, who dies in the hospital.

Somehow, all of this is only the beginning. Yusuke drives some more, the wheels of his car transitioning to the turning of a cassette tape that he plays whenever he's behind the wheel. It contains the voice of his wife, reciting the other characters' lines for Yusuke to practice the title role of the Russian drama. It's a particularly effective and efficient moment of editing, which puts Yusuke's driving into an entirely different context—his grief for Oto, the mystery of the woman he loved, having the control of considering and facing all of this within the confines and through the power of the car.

Two years after Oto's death, Yusuke travels to Hiroshima to direct a performance of Uncle Vanya. Most of the story revolves around the rehearsals, as the actors—including Koshi Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), a now-disgraced actor with a quick temper, whom Yusuke is convinced he saw having sex with Oto—work to overcome the language barrier and understand their director's almost robotic process.

Lee Yoon-a (Park Yurim), one of the actors, speaks in Korean sign language (She's also connected to the production's dramaturge, played by Jin Daeyeon), and there are a pair of moments here—an outdoor rehearsal and a performance—that use silence and the emotional expressiveness of the language to great effect. Those moments highlight that there are depths in that to which these characters don't give voice, whether it be the earlier bond between Yusuke and Oto or a scene, which breaks down the barrier between the actors and the audience by having the characters look at the camera, in which Koshi may or may not confess to having an affair with Oto.

All the while, the festival refuses to let Yusuke drive himself, meaning he has to give over some of that precious control to Misaki (Toko Miura). She's a professional driver who, as we learn with same sense of patience and gradual revelation, has her own reasons for seeing the act of driving as a means to find some kind of peace and understanding with her own tragic past. The relationship between these two is completely ordinary for so long, but after the two explain some their respective pasts to each other, the silences, especially a long one during a final road trip, take on the weight of mourning, guilt, and absences that cannot be filled.

The film firmly establishes its lonely and wounded characters, its melancholy tone, and its empathetic philosophy of the lost finding connections with each other. The deliberate pace and attentive storytelling of Drive My Car only deepen our own connection to those goals.

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