Language: Japanese
There is a hypnotic quality about Drive My Car that quietly defines the pages of Haruki Murakami from which the film draws script material. The Ryusuke Hamaguchi directorial, based on the Japanese literary maestro’s short story of the same name, captures the Murakami essence as completely as few cinematic attempts have done. The film is an intimate tale of love, loss and loneliness, and at the same time a moody narrative that sets up drama using the themes of fate and regret as its immense runtime of 179 minutes plays out. In the world of Murakami, turmoil isn’t typified by haste.
Hamaguchi’s intent of setting up a nuanced dissection of plot and characters becomes obvious at the outset as he invests nearly 40 minutes to establish prelude to the tale. If the filmmaker set out to turn Murakami’s short story into a screen epic, he has managed to reimagine the author’s postmodern mystique with understated ease. The three awards including Best Screenplay at Cannes last year and four nominations at the Oscars (Best Film, Director and Adapted Screenplay, besides its winning category of Best International Film) endorse Hamaguchi’s assuredness while interpretating the complex drama from book to screen.
The film opens introducing us to stage actor and director Yusuke Kafuku’s (Hidetoshi Nishijima) marital life with television writer Oto (Reika Kirishima). Yusuke is deeply in love with Oto, who seeks creative inspiration in sex and has been cheating on him. Twist in Yusuke’s life comes with Oto’s sudden death, and the screenplay (Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe) takes us ahead by a couple of years. Yusuke is now in Hiroshima, directing an adaptation of the classic Chekov play, Uncle Vanya.
The choice of Uncle Vanya is far from a random one. The underlying theme of Chekov’s play is disillusionment and its story culminates in ambiguity, offering no definite resolution. In the film, Yusuke seems to have an uneasy relationship with the play. Soon after Oto’s demise, when he sets out to perform Uncle Vanya, he struggles to complete the performance.
“Chekov is terrifying. When you say his lines, he drags out the real you,” Yusuke says at one point in the film. He casts actors of diverse origins in his stage interpretation with each actor delivering his or her lines in their native tongue. It is his way of letting each player “drag out” and take “the real you”, or the character’s core essence to the audience without compromise, using the language in which they communicate most naturally.
There is a reason Yusuke shares such a deep bond with the play, beyond aesthetic reverence for Chekov’s art. He has a tape with Oto’s voice reciting lines of the play, which he loves listening to as he drives around. In Hiroshima that tranquillity is broken when the theatre company assigns a young woman named Watari (Toko Miura) as Yusuke’s personal chauffeur. Protocol demands he must adhere to the arrangement, and it threatens to disturb his private space in the car with Oto’s recordings and memories. Yusuke is reluctant to accept Watari’s service at first but they foster a bond over time. He discovers Watari, too, is struggling with a tragic back story.
The car, a red Saab 900 Turbo, becomes as fascinating a character as any other in the fictional world Hamaguchi deals with. The vehicle is a microcosm of Yusuke’s innermost world, defining freedom and suffocation at the same time. It is his sacred domain where he can free himself from the mundane world and live with Oto’s memories. Yet, her voice constantly ties him down to the pain of her loss.
The design of car is brilliantly used to represent Yusuke’s stifled mind. To understand the significance of the particular model chosen for the story, the Saab 900 Turbo is a four-seater with two doors. Every time Yusuke has to let in or let out a co-passenger who uses the rear seat, he must uncomfortably get out of the car and push forward the front seat. The situation is demonstrated when Yusuke agrees to give Koji (Masaki Okada), the lead actor of his play, a lift. It is the first time he lets in a co-passenger in his car after Oto’s death. Through the conversation that follows, it is also the first time he lets in an outsider to Oto’s memory after her death.
The importance of car (and hence the film’s title, incidentally is drawn from an evergreen hit by the Beatles), also lies in the fact that a large portion of the narrative involving the film’s two key characters — Yusuke and his chauffer Watari — develops within the confines of the vehicle.
Hamaguchi crafts an engrossing cinematic style using varied influences. You spot cinema verité in his use of ordinary situations and conversations that resonate till long after.
His film is intimate in the way it tries observing and understanding all that his characters go through, and the camera’s paying attention to how the actors react to a scene could remind you of Eric Rohmer’s oeuvre. Hamaguchi has a background in documentary filmmaking, a fact reminiscent in the way he brings alive many scenes.
Given such a filmmaking approach, the film’s extensive runtime would seem justified. The story demands audience participation beyond being mere spectators to how life unfolds for the characters on screen. The runtime gives space to the viewer to understand and empathise with each protagonist.
With a source as rich as Murakami for script material, Hamaguchi naturally starts out with an advantage but his screen-writing along with Takamasa Oe is effective for the way they tell the story. Dialogues become important for a film as this because the filmmaker has avoided flashbacks or voiceovers to convey backstory or state of mind. Instead, the screenplay lets the actors emote verbally as well as using body language. It is the sort of storytelling that lets viewers decide for themselves.
As Yusuke, Hidetoshi Nishijima is understated in the way he brings alive the protagonist’s grief. He is a shattered man who hides his pain beneath a stoic veneer and occupational involvement. Nishijima is impressive in the way he essays Yusuke as a man who simply won’t give away who he truly is.
Nishijima’s act is complemented by Toko Miura as Watari, who quietly contends with demons of her past. There is an enigmatic quality about Watari, and Miura lives that trait without being flashy about it. The metamorphosis of the relationship that Yusuke and Watari share is seamlessly brought alive by Nishijima and Miura, from detached reluctance to vibes that reveal warmth and innate understanding.
Compared to Yusuke and Watari, Reika Kirishima as Oto gets an early exit. Yet, she continues to exist in each moment of the storyline. The story gives ample layers to Oto for the audience to understand what she does and Kirishima does well to bring alive a complex character with limited footage.
The film impresses technically despite narrating a story that banks on finer sensibility than flourish. The visual impact is never overt, yet cinematographer Hidetoshi Shinomiya manages to leave a mark with the way he shoots his frames, be it urban Japanese cityscape or close-ups that capture extreme emotions. Shinomiya scores with the way he brings alive the world as Yusuke sees it through the windows of his car. The photography, along with Azusa Yamazaki’s editing and Eiko Ishibashi’s music, becomes as significant as the film’s supporting cast to prop up inherent symbolism as the film plays lays bare the emotions of its protagonists.
Drive My Car is poetry in motion. The film’s impact lies in its powerful silences that render deeper context to the humanistic drama which unfolds through spoken words. Craft-wise, Hamaguchi’s is a film that celebrates the art of cinema as few efforts have done in recent times.
Drive My Car streams in India from 1 April onwards on MUBI
Rating: * * * *
Vinayak Chakravorty is a critic, columnist, and film journalist based in Delhi-NCR.
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