Drive my car

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, screening now at Ragtag Cinema, is one of the loveliest and most moving films you’ll see this year.  It truly is a remarkable accomplishment, a quietly powerful meditation on love, loss, and regret that addresses several Big Questions without ever truly resolving them.  What does it mean to truly know someone? Is that even possible? How does one continue on in the face of grief? How do humans coexist and understand each other in a post-Babel world? What’s the point of it all? As in life, there’s no easy answer to these questions, and to its credit, the film doesn’t even try to answer them. Yet despite grappling with these existential quandaries, the film is surprisingly light on its feet and has a warmly beating heart that’s evident throughout.

Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a successful theater actor and director who has a fondness for staging classics with a multilingual, contemporary twist.  The first time we see him at work, he’s staging a production of Waiting for Godot in which all the performers’ dialogue is displayed as subtitles on a screen behind the stage, in multiple languages. As a deaf viewer, I have to admit, this immediately endeared me to Yusuke. Caption everything! (Putting my soapbox away.) Yusuke is married to Oto (Reika Kirishima), a television writer who has a tendency to use their sexual life as inspiration for her stories. After they make love, she goes into a trance-like state and extemporaneously begins narrating a story. The next morning, she and Yusuke workshop the story together. And the cycle repeats itself. They appear to truly be a couple in love, fulfilled creatively both by their professions and by each other. But of course, this is a drama, and nothing is as perfect as it seems. There are cracks beneath the surface (this movie may be triggering for anyone who’s been affected by adultery), and Yusuke finds himself grappling with unfathomable loss. He’s then invited to put on a production of Uncle Vanya at a theater festival in rural Japan. The organizers insist he have a driver. Yusuke, an unfussy man who nevertheless takes pride in his car and driving it himself, is taken aback and has no choice but to agree. And off our story goes.

The plot unfolds at a leisurely pace—even the opening credits don’t begin until the end of this prelude, roughly 40 minutes into the film.  Despite the fact that the film is in no hurry, its nearly three hour run time clips along effortlessly. (Bloated superhero movies such as Avengers Endgame, take note.) Yet each scene is so intimate and quietly profound that not a moment of it feels wasted. Every scene, every interaction, helps you to understand the characters that much more.

Part of what makes this film so intimate is that it’s essentially a four-hander. There’s Yusuke, the polite stoic whose façade gradually cracks over the course of the movie, and Oto, the cipher who drives (get it?) other characters’ search for meaning.  There’s also Misaka Watari (Toko Miura), Yusuke’s driver, who has a similar penchant for stoicism and also finds her defenses gradually, subtly lowered.  If any of the characters is worthy of scorn, it’s Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), the young actor who previously had an affair with Oto and whom Yusuke casts as the lead in Uncle Vanya—an aggressive power move given the age difference and the fact that it’s a role Yusuke was born to play. Despite the character’s ugliness, even Takatsuki is an empathetic, tragic figure in his own right—you don’t like him, and you’re not really supposed to, but you understand him. 

Scenes are shot in a cold, muted light which only serves to emphasize the loveliness of the images on screen—a snowy, barren hillside, the slowly churning wake of a ferryboat, Yusuke’s candy-red car gliding dreamily down the highway. I’m of the firm opinion that the best films are the ones that show rather than tell, and this film is no exception.  The camerawork operates in tandem with the minimalist script, getting the most out of the actors’ already terrific, restrained performances. Shots linger on characters’ microexpressions, giving you hints of the inner turmoil bubbling just beneath the surface. Hamaguchi is largely consistent in his aesthetic, though he’s not afraid to change up his visual style when it suits the plot. In one key moment, Yusuke and Takatsuki each break the fourth wall, speaking directly to the camera, a gimmick used to great effect in 1953’s Tokyo Story. The effect is initially jarring, but it’s a major moment for both characters and further reinforces the car-as-therapist’s office motif that flits in and out of the film.

Costume design is also uniformly excellent and reveals volumes about each person.  One key scene which features a major revelation from another character shows Yusuke--who normally wears tight-fitting yet conservative clothing—wearing a shoddy, rumpled, ill-fitting jacket, in a tacit acknowledgement that he is not the only one with a story to tell. The final scenes do contain a smattering of on-the-nose dialogue, but by then, you’ve become so invested in the characters and their well-being that you don’t care.

The film largely unfolds in this way, with characters lurching from one quietly revealing encounter to the next, leading into the raw, emotionally powerful finale.  Again, there are no easy answers here, but the audience is still left overall with a cautiously optimistic reading. Yes, these characters have suffered, and only some have arguably deserved it. But they each, in their own way, find a way to carry on. A way to persevere in the face of grief. A way to cope with their own regrets and perceived failings. A way to find themselves, and each other. They’ve learned to cede control of themselves, and to let someone else take the wheel.