Film review: By turns oblique and mesmerizing, Drive My Car takes a road trip through loss and uncertainty
A Japanese theatre artist deals with loss and pain while sitting in a bright red Saab
VIFF presents Drive My Car at the Vancity Theatre to December 20
OBLIQUE, CEREBRAL, beguiling, aloof: over its three-hour run, Drive My Car reveals many subtle sides—often via a series of extended conversations in a shiny red Saab.
Long after it ends, you may still be mulling over what exactly it was about. And as confusing as that sounds, that ambiguity is both Drive My Car’s draw and drawback.
Like the Anton Chekhov play Uncle Vanya that it references throughout, the film is about a sense of amorphous loss and heartbreak that the numbed characters struggle to articulate. And for anyone who’s found themselves unable to express exactly what they’re feeling in these uncertain pandemic times, that ennui is going to hit home.
The film opens with the mesmerizing Oto (Reika Kirishima), sitting naked as the sun rises over the Tokyo skyline out her window, recounting an erotic TV script to her theatre-star spouse, Yūsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijimai). She and her husband have a close artistic bond—but there are other layers to their story, including a traumatic loss and infidelity. Soon Yūsuke will lose Oto, too, and we move two years forward to Hiroshima, where he is about to stage a multilingual Uncle Vanya—choosing to cast his wife’s troubled young lover Takatsuki (Masaki Okada) in the lead role. In a parallel plot, theatre company requires a young, 23-year-old hired driver (Tôko Miura) to take the wheel of his beloved Saab. She’s as inscrutable as he is, but in the hourlong drives from his seaside apartment to the studio, he starts to learn about her sad story.
The experience of watching Drive My Car brings to mind Sonya’s famous final monologue in Uncle Vanya: “We shall live all through the endless procession of days ahead of us, and through the long evenings. We shall bear patiently the burdens that fate imposes on us.” Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has stretched Haruki Murakami’s 45-page short story of the same name into something more ponderous and philosophical, emphasizing that “endless procession” in the long drives that fill each day and night.
Hamaguchi shoots it all at a meticulous, unhurried pace, and with an often cold, quiet remove that’s heightened by Eiko Ishibashi’s icily haunting score. Long shots—including overhead views of the scarlet Saab as it winds around island roads and travels over bridges, or in wide frames of figures dwarfed on a misty seawall—heighten the sense of distance.
When the intense closeups come, often in the confined, private space of the titular car, the characters start to unravel their secret stories and deepest worries. But more often than not we’re left to imagine what they’re thinking, as Yūsuke stares out the backseat window, listening to a tape of his wife rehearsing Uncle Vanya; as his driver focuses intently on the road—as if letting her mind stray to anything else would be too painful; or as Yūsuke and Takatsuki silently hold their lit cigarettes up and out the sunroof, releasing the smoke into the emptiness of the night.
Unless you can submit to its meditative rhythms, Drive My Car may feel overly ruminative and ambiguous—possibly too much for a time when the future and the state of the world is so ambiguous. But if you can stick it out to the final moments of this long and winding road trip, there's a surprisingly moving payoff—and it involves a performance of the last section of Sonya’s monologue. The scene somehow brings all the amorphous ideas of the film together. For a moment, it seems clear that, to cope with the agony of existence, we have to connect with others who have also suffered. But art may also alleviate the pain.
Related Articles
