Review: Drive My Car (2021)
A driver with a past as fraught as his own helps a theater director process his trauma
Drive My Car (2021)
Co-written and directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi
Also written by Takamasa Oe
Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami
Derived and expanded from a short story by Haruki Murakami, the Japanese author whose gently surreal novels are popular in the West, “Drive My Car” tells the story of Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a theater director whose mounting personal tragedies threaten to undermine his professional life.
At first, his actress wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) is traumatized by the death of their four-year-old child. To recover her equilibrium, she starts a new career as a screenwriter, one with a peculiar writing technique: after having sex with her husband, and still on a post-orgasmic high,1 she begins free-associating the plot of a new story. We see this happening: immediately after the fucking stops, she begins spieling a story about a high school girl who repeatedly breaks into the house of a boy she has a crush on, leaving him cryptic gifts; in a surreal touch familiar to Murakami’s readers, the story also includes the girl imagining that she lived a past life as a neurotic lamprey eel. As Kafuku later explains, it’s his role to listen carefully and retell the story back to Oto the next day, so that she can take notes on which she bases her screenplays.
Oto is such a passionate woman that she also has many affairs with men, often those related to the film productions of her scripts. Her many affairs threaten their marriage because she doesn’t know that Kafuku is well aware of them and wonders why she isn’t honest with him about them. Finally, she dies of a brain hemorrhage, and he is haunted by the fact that he might have come home in time to save her if he hadn’t been so shocked by her latest infidelity. End of Act I.
Act II: It’s two years later. Kafuku begins a two-month residency in Hiroshima to direct a production of “Uncle Vanya.” Though the famous director is known for playing the title role in previous productions of the Chekhov play, he announces that he can no longer do so because Chekhov’s text has the ability to strike at the hearts of those who perform it, and his heart’s had quite enough. Auditions are open to performers from around Asia; to Kafuku’s shock, among the actors who auditiis on the young TV star whom he saw in his wife’s arms on the day she died — it was this sight that so shocked him that he didn’t come home in time to save her.
So Kafuku makes a fateful choice: he casts the young man, Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), who has quit the talent agency that made him a star, in the title role of Uncle Vanya, the role Kafuku himself was expected to play. Perhaps Kafuku hires him because he wants to get into the mind of the last person to see Oto alive — someone who was, unlike Kafuku himself, present with her. As it happens, Takatsuki is not only relatively inexperienced; he’s also impetuous. When someone sneaks a picture of him in a restaurant, Takatsuki roughly confronts the photographer, seizing by the collar and demanding that he delete the shot. Later, he chases down another photographer and beats him.
The theater hosting the residency has a peculiar requirement: Kafuku is not permitted to drive during the engagement. They have hired a professional driver, a young woman named Misaki (Toko Miura). Skeptical at first, Kafuku has to admit that she is an excellent driver,2 but when he casually asks how she learned to drive so well, he gets an earful. As a young teenager, Misaki had to drive her abusive mother, a sex worker in Sapporo, an hour each way to the train station from their remote village, and back home the next morning, and if she jarred the woman during the drive she would be beaten. So she learned to drive in an absolutely smooth manner.
This is another Murakami trademark: a young woman making a disruptive appearance in the life of a middle-aged man. Fortunately, she’s not the manic pixie dream girl typical of Murakami, but a unique character. Masaki is reserved, rarely smiles, and concentrates on performing her job; she doesn’t tease or flirt. But as Kafuku struggles to bring the production of “Uncle Vanya” to fruition, a long, revelatory conversation between the director and Tatatsuki in the car leads Masaki to reveal more of her own past. That’s act III.
Something I marveled at while watching this movie is its complex plot and characters. Indeed, Hamaguchi, the film’s director and no doubt its primary writer, must have expanded Murakami’s short story, because this three-hour movie has the depth and scope of a novel. In addition, there must be something in the film’s story and themes that echoes those in “Uncle Vanya,” but I don’t know enough about the play to be able to say. Nevertheless, I hugely enjoyed the movie, so you don’t have to really know Chekhov to watch it. There are many moments of beauty that I won’t even bother to go into. It’s better if you’re surprised by them.
Leave it to a man (Murakami, the author of the original story on which the film is based) to assume that a woman naturally comes at the end of intercourse along with her partner. The precocious teenage girl protagonist of Oto’s story is another typical Murakami character.
Another Murakami trademark is some reference to the Beatles. (One of his novels, “Norweigian Wood,” also takes its title from that of a Beatles song.) I don’t know if the original story has a more explicit reference, but thankfully the movie lets the title speak for itself.