Beep beep, beep beep, yeah
The paradox of Drive My Car is that nearly every individual moment within it feels like the most delicate kind of minimalism, while the film that is the sum total of all those individual moments has the grandeur of a big, sweeping epic. This is, not least, because there are almost three hours worth of those moments, and that kind of length has a way of embedding a sense of majestic scale into even the most simple, spare material. And, indeed, Drive My Car is made almost entirely out of the most simple, spare material: the title refers to a major plotline in the film wherein a theater director is driven to and from the theater every day by a woman forced on him by the play's producers, taking about an hour each way. On these trips, they mostly don't talk, and he listens to an audio recording of his dead wife reciting the text of the play he's in the process of staging.
The film is the second feature directed by Hamaguchi Ryusuke to see release in 2021 (the first was Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy), and the one that has made him explode in international prominence after more than a decade of steady work in both fiction and nonfiction cinema. Of the meager number of his films that I've seen, it's also the most confident and accomplished, full of strong compositions hiding in the form of disaffected, tossed-off realism, and writing that carefully portions out details about the main characters such that they always feel closed-off and guarded, yet by the end of the film we know such an extraordinary amount about them. It also includes tens of minutes worth of scenes and subplots that I would consider to be dead air, but that's very obviously a minority opinion.
Drive My Car is adapted mostly from the story of the same title by Murakami Haruki, drawing elements from two other stories in the same collection, 2014's Men Without Women. And the thing I just said up there was the plot doesn't kick in until somewhere in the second hour; even the opening credits don't show up until around the 45-minute mark, giving everything that has preceded the feeling of being a kind of prelude. This is fair enough, though it also sells the opening act short; some of the film's loveliest character material comes here, in the portrayal of the Kafuku marriage, between actor/director Yusuke (Nishijima Hidetoshi), and writer Oto (Kirishima Reika). Hamaguchi introduces them in a big way, showing them having sex in what is apparently as much a creative endeavor as a romantic, intimate one. And that turns into a kind of symbolism, though Drive My Car is thankfully too crafty and elliptical to demand that we pay notice to such things. Still, the idea of artistic expression as a fundamentally intimate, naked act is one that underpins much of the remaining three hours, and certainly it's not hiding the idea that Yusuke's rejection of theater after Oto's death, and the strained difficulty he has in return to it after two years wallowing in loss, is a kind of celibacy, or self-imposed impotence.
So anyway, first we get a marvelous 45-minute gem about married life, in which its idiosyncratic charms are slowly shaved away to reveal uncertainties and disconnects, and then Oto dies. And this is where Drive My Car simultaneously opens up and, I think, loses its way. The remainder of the film, after its two-year jump forward, finds Yusuke grinding unhappily forward on a production of Uncle Vanya, starring Oto's lover Koji (Okada Masaki) whose gimmick is that it's being cast without regard to language, meaning that there are cast members speaking in Japanese, Korean, and Korean Sign Language; the film also clearly means this to be symbolic (both the mutually untelligible casting, and the Chekhov play itself), and once again doesn't get overly precious about it. Yusuke's general weariness and recent diagnosis of glaucoma have made him enough of an insurance risk that he is forced to take on Watari Misaki (Miura Toko) to drive his scorchingly bright red car, and that is, in its way, the whole of the movie.
Trying to deal with Drive My Car at the level of story is, on the one hand, necessary - this is about a bereaved man who has shuttered every emotional outlet being forced into the world of the living, and not necessarily responding well in the trite, redemptive way that the movies would train us to anticipate; you need to have that arc for literally anything else here to be legible - and on the other hand, clearly inadequate. The story here is a whisper, a conceit, fragments of private lives we're getting to snatch away when the participants aren't looking. It's certainly not three hours' worth of story, although one of the very, very impressive things about Drive My Car is that it doesn't really feel like a three-hour-long film; not that it races by like a high-end action thriller, but it's certainly not slow cinema. Even so, it is a lingering film, arriving in scenes and then waiting to see what the characters will do in them. One of the best parts of Drive My Car is that it genuinely doesn't seem to have figured out Yusuke or Misaki at the start, though the actors clearly have; it's immensely curious about these fragile people, and it's that curiosity, rather than the execution of an arc whose end point is clear from early on, that fuels the movie.
This doesn't all come off without a hitch. Speaking entirely for myself, I found the theater rehearsal scenes to be a fairly tepid experience, which I think is largely because the multilingual Vanya angle never felt like more than a baggy metaphor to me; I'm enough of a philistine about theater that my reaction to the conceit is "wow, that sure sounds like a disaster waiting to happen", and I'm absolutely sure that Drive My Car didn't want me to. On top of that, while the theater scenes are a cornerstone of Yusuke's arc across the film, they do basically nothing at all for Misaki, and I find the dynamic between those two and each other, and between those two and their own respective histories, to be much the most impressive part of the film. This ultimately leads to a final 30 minutes that seemed even more exciting in their precision and humanity than the opening 45, but that sums to less than half of the entire running time.
A certain amount of wandering is built into the scenario, though, and then further emphasised by Hamaguchi's minimalist aesthetic. He's prone to creating simple, static visual moments and letting the actors find their own speed through them, which is part of why I haven't had that "I love you" reaction that so many critics seemed to feel. Still, Drive My Car is, by this director's standards, an impressively visual film. Much of this is because of the car itself, a bright dollop of shocking red in the midst of frames that are always carefully denuded of that color otherwise. Early on - "early" within the context of a three-hour movie, anyways - there's a shot of the car disappearing along the length of a highway, viewed from very far away, and the energy created just by this spare amount of color and movement fills the entire frame with a sense of epic melancholy.
Color is pretty consistently a strength here, or its absence. If the red car is the dominant visual motif of the movie, empty, soft white backgrounds are the foundation of everything else, with overcast exterior skies giving the whole movie a bit of a grey glow. This culminates in a fantastic scene set against the snow, late in the move, where the simple act of moving characters against the dead white environment gives almost as much emotional weight to the scene as the words and performances do.
So all in all, a substantial achievement, even if I can't bring myself to see the once-a-year special masterwork that a lot of people have. No question that Hamaguchi has a remarkable amount of confidence, though, and a remarkably delicate touch for writing characters to have unfathomable depths expressed through the slightest gestures and sparest dialogue. Drive My Car is an unmistakably formidable film, masterpiece or no, and its status as one of the essential films of 2021 is hard to gainsay.
The film is the second feature directed by Hamaguchi Ryusuke to see release in 2021 (the first was Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy), and the one that has made him explode in international prominence after more than a decade of steady work in both fiction and nonfiction cinema. Of the meager number of his films that I've seen, it's also the most confident and accomplished, full of strong compositions hiding in the form of disaffected, tossed-off realism, and writing that carefully portions out details about the main characters such that they always feel closed-off and guarded, yet by the end of the film we know such an extraordinary amount about them. It also includes tens of minutes worth of scenes and subplots that I would consider to be dead air, but that's very obviously a minority opinion.
Drive My Car is adapted mostly from the story of the same title by Murakami Haruki, drawing elements from two other stories in the same collection, 2014's Men Without Women. And the thing I just said up there was the plot doesn't kick in until somewhere in the second hour; even the opening credits don't show up until around the 45-minute mark, giving everything that has preceded the feeling of being a kind of prelude. This is fair enough, though it also sells the opening act short; some of the film's loveliest character material comes here, in the portrayal of the Kafuku marriage, between actor/director Yusuke (Nishijima Hidetoshi), and writer Oto (Kirishima Reika). Hamaguchi introduces them in a big way, showing them having sex in what is apparently as much a creative endeavor as a romantic, intimate one. And that turns into a kind of symbolism, though Drive My Car is thankfully too crafty and elliptical to demand that we pay notice to such things. Still, the idea of artistic expression as a fundamentally intimate, naked act is one that underpins much of the remaining three hours, and certainly it's not hiding the idea that Yusuke's rejection of theater after Oto's death, and the strained difficulty he has in return to it after two years wallowing in loss, is a kind of celibacy, or self-imposed impotence.
So anyway, first we get a marvelous 45-minute gem about married life, in which its idiosyncratic charms are slowly shaved away to reveal uncertainties and disconnects, and then Oto dies. And this is where Drive My Car simultaneously opens up and, I think, loses its way. The remainder of the film, after its two-year jump forward, finds Yusuke grinding unhappily forward on a production of Uncle Vanya, starring Oto's lover Koji (Okada Masaki) whose gimmick is that it's being cast without regard to language, meaning that there are cast members speaking in Japanese, Korean, and Korean Sign Language; the film also clearly means this to be symbolic (both the mutually untelligible casting, and the Chekhov play itself), and once again doesn't get overly precious about it. Yusuke's general weariness and recent diagnosis of glaucoma have made him enough of an insurance risk that he is forced to take on Watari Misaki (Miura Toko) to drive his scorchingly bright red car, and that is, in its way, the whole of the movie.
Trying to deal with Drive My Car at the level of story is, on the one hand, necessary - this is about a bereaved man who has shuttered every emotional outlet being forced into the world of the living, and not necessarily responding well in the trite, redemptive way that the movies would train us to anticipate; you need to have that arc for literally anything else here to be legible - and on the other hand, clearly inadequate. The story here is a whisper, a conceit, fragments of private lives we're getting to snatch away when the participants aren't looking. It's certainly not three hours' worth of story, although one of the very, very impressive things about Drive My Car is that it doesn't really feel like a three-hour-long film; not that it races by like a high-end action thriller, but it's certainly not slow cinema. Even so, it is a lingering film, arriving in scenes and then waiting to see what the characters will do in them. One of the best parts of Drive My Car is that it genuinely doesn't seem to have figured out Yusuke or Misaki at the start, though the actors clearly have; it's immensely curious about these fragile people, and it's that curiosity, rather than the execution of an arc whose end point is clear from early on, that fuels the movie.
This doesn't all come off without a hitch. Speaking entirely for myself, I found the theater rehearsal scenes to be a fairly tepid experience, which I think is largely because the multilingual Vanya angle never felt like more than a baggy metaphor to me; I'm enough of a philistine about theater that my reaction to the conceit is "wow, that sure sounds like a disaster waiting to happen", and I'm absolutely sure that Drive My Car didn't want me to. On top of that, while the theater scenes are a cornerstone of Yusuke's arc across the film, they do basically nothing at all for Misaki, and I find the dynamic between those two and each other, and between those two and their own respective histories, to be much the most impressive part of the film. This ultimately leads to a final 30 minutes that seemed even more exciting in their precision and humanity than the opening 45, but that sums to less than half of the entire running time.
A certain amount of wandering is built into the scenario, though, and then further emphasised by Hamaguchi's minimalist aesthetic. He's prone to creating simple, static visual moments and letting the actors find their own speed through them, which is part of why I haven't had that "I love you" reaction that so many critics seemed to feel. Still, Drive My Car is, by this director's standards, an impressively visual film. Much of this is because of the car itself, a bright dollop of shocking red in the midst of frames that are always carefully denuded of that color otherwise. Early on - "early" within the context of a three-hour movie, anyways - there's a shot of the car disappearing along the length of a highway, viewed from very far away, and the energy created just by this spare amount of color and movement fills the entire frame with a sense of epic melancholy.
Color is pretty consistently a strength here, or its absence. If the red car is the dominant visual motif of the movie, empty, soft white backgrounds are the foundation of everything else, with overcast exterior skies giving the whole movie a bit of a grey glow. This culminates in a fantastic scene set against the snow, late in the move, where the simple act of moving characters against the dead white environment gives almost as much emotional weight to the scene as the words and performances do.
So all in all, a substantial achievement, even if I can't bring myself to see the once-a-year special masterwork that a lot of people have. No question that Hamaguchi has a remarkable amount of confidence, though, and a remarkably delicate touch for writing characters to have unfathomable depths expressed through the slightest gestures and sparest dialogue. Drive My Car is an unmistakably formidable film, masterpiece or no, and its status as one of the essential films of 2021 is hard to gainsay.
Categories: domestic dramas, japanese cinema
