Drive My Car: A Comforting Yet Exalting Ride
By Alex Yu
The Japanese film, Drive My Car recently received four nominations from the 94th Academy Awards, including best picture, best international feature film, best director, and best adapted screenplay. Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car is one of his features released in 2021, the other being Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021). It is also the first time Hamaguchi has received the best international feature film nomination honor, which shows that the film is truly a work of art and craftsmanship. Gleaning inspirations from one of the stories in the short story collection of Haruki Murakami, Men without Woman, this film tells a story about love and lust, living and grief, through a theater director who lost his beloved wife. The film allows the emotions to seep through and takes the audience on a heart-wrenching journey of three hours in understanding humanity.
The film begins in a dimly lit room in the dusk. Theater director and actor, Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and his wife, screenwriter Oto (Reika Kirishima) are wrapped in the serenity after sex in bed. Oto is constructing a story verbally with Yusuke remembering. This has been Oto’s way of writing stories and this couple’s custom since the loss of their daughter. The story is about a teenage girl in total infatuation with her classmate, so she sneaks into this boy’s house and leaves her token in his room every time without being noticed. The beginning of this film is well-designed to set the form of the film — fictional story narration entangled with the story happening in real-time, calling upon a self-referential sentiment. While listening to the narration, the summoned emotion of the protagonist collides with the character’s action and lines in the narrative story. As Yusuke’s ritual of driving, he listens to the cassette tape of lines from his play recorded by Oto. This transmission of feelings between reality and fiction, character and protagonist, flows like a river. It is also the same for the audience when watching the film. This is an ingenious way of using the different layers of storytelling to break down the barrier of the screen, creating the communication of overlapping emotions in the space of the movie theater.
The sudden death of Oto breaks the balance of Yusuke’s life. However, the balance was a carefully weaved lie by the couple — underneath the seemingly consummate marriage is Oto’s unfaithfulness, which Yusuke remains silent to. There is a scene where the moving car wheels transition to the reels of the cassette tape, indicating the inseparable connection between them — listening to the tape and driving is Yusuke’s way of remembering his love and loss. Two years later, Yusuke received a position as a theater director for his new project, the stage version of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, where different characters speak different languages. The film’s first part serves almost as a prologue until this point. When Yusuke drives to Hiroshima, we see the title sequence appearing on the screen, complementing the driving scenes of shots in artful compositions. At this moment, the audience realizes that Yusuke’s story begins as a “man without a woman.”
The theater job requires the director to have a driver, which means he will no longer drive his car. Driving his car while listening to the cassette tape has become a ritual where he recites lines and remembers his wife; therefore, Yusuke is reluctant to have someone drive his car. However, destiny brings Yusuke and his driver, Misaki (Touko Miura), together for a reason; similar to Yusuke’s attachment to his Saab car, Misaki has a scar on her face, a reminder of her loss and mourning. However, in the process of them getting to know each other, we understand the story is about redemption between two lost souls and their acceptance of grief — an unexpected yet beautiful friendship between a middle-aged man and a young woman.
Hamaguchi is undoubtedly a virtuoso in symbolism, similar to his previous film Asako I & II (2018), where he had the same actor playing two different roles as a potent visual symbol of indication, in Drive My Car, he uses the protagonist’s Saab car as the motif to convey feelings and meaning. The bright red color of the car is in sharp contrast with the protagonist’s dressing: all black, a quiet color, which shows his restrained stoic personality. It is not hard to see that the director is trying to indicate the passionate and emotional side of Yusuke hidden in his heart. Moreover, the way Yusuke takes care of his car, a 1987 Saab 900 Turbo, shows his nostalgic and consistent quality, which aligns with his behaviors after his wife passed away. As the medium of emotions, the car bears the weight of Yusuke’s grief and love, which is why he insists on driving himself — grief is a personal journey that one can only come to a resolution by himself. As much as the car is a sacred and private space for Yusuke, it’s been “intruded” by Misaki, and a young actor, Koji (Masaki Okada), who worked and potentially had a relationship with Oto. Ironically, those two characters have the most influence on Yusuke’s journey of grief and moving on with life, through which the director is trying to tell us that even though grief is one’s private journey, no man is an island.
Drive My Car is a film beautifully contrived with shots and compositions of artfulness made possible by cinematographer Hidetoshi Shinomiya. From the tight shot fixed on the characters’ faces in the car, the occasional bird view of the driving scene, to the full shot of the vehicle against the vast background, everything is shot with intentions. The different smoking scenes are a great example of showing the relationship between Yusuke and Misaki. From Yusuke watching Misaki smoke, to them smoking together by the river in the distance, to smoking together in the car with their hands reaching out of the skylight side by side, the distance between them becomes closer and closer, the bond between them becomes more robust.
Drive My Car fully embodies Hamaguchi’s film style, restrained yet exalting. The gentle touch of the film makes it possible a naturalness of reality with natural escalation on the screen. When dealing with grief, the characters live in the present, and there is no recollection of scenes from the past. Drive My Car comforts the audience who had lost their loved ones with its poetic storytelling and understanding in grief: Grief is like driving at your own pace; drive your car until you no longer need to drive, grieving until you are relieved.
