Originally published January 2022
Drive My Car, directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi, is the first Japanese film to be nominated for Best Picture. Count me among those who would have it be the first winner of the award, as well.
The film is based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, a writer whose style I wouldn’t have described as especially translatable to cinema. But Hamaguchi relates the world of Murakami without compromise, boldly presenting us with the writer’s favorite elements: a confused, adrift man; an inscrutable, darkly erotic woman; the fight for authenticity in an impersonal world; and the grave shadow of Japan’s twentieth century military history. With this confidence in his non-mainstream source, Hamaguchi has given us something that feels rawer and fresher than anything I’ve seen on the screen this year.
Central to the tone of the film is incoherence: events don’t form a comforting narrative; life doesn’t make sense. Protagonist Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) has lost his daughter and his wife (Reika Kirishima) to two separate tragedies and is trying to pick up the pieces—but the pieces just won’t fit. His wife surely loved him, but she cheated on him frequently. He in turn loved her but never confronted her about her infidelity, although he knew about it. Was she hoping that he would call her out on her affairs? Why didn’t he? How much of their relationship was real, and how much a lie?
A possible clue comes in the form of the revealed ending to her last screenplay idea, previously thought to be unfinished. The screenplay in totality suggests a feeling of overwhelming remorse, of having changed the world for the worse and being unable to rectify it. Does this signify that Yusuke’s wife regretted cheating and felt unable to return to the type of innocence she had with her husband before she ever did?
These questions must remain unanswered. This is not a mystery film; rather, it is a film about mysteries, the important kind of mysteries: the ones that are never solved.
Following his daughter’s death at four years old to pneumonia, Yusuke has shifted his career exclusively to theater, focusing in particular, it seems, on existentialist dramas like Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, which emphasize life’s bleakness and illogic. This is understandable given how, we can assume, Yusuke’s outlook on life changed after that event. But unlike his daughter’s death, his wife’s death (from cerebral hemorrhage) has too many loose ends for him to continue to find solace in renderings of life’s randomness, and he therefore embarks on a strange quest, casting one of his wife’s former lovers (Masaki Okada) in a role that everyone assumed he would play himself.
This seems to convey that Yusuke is and has been living vicariously through the younger actor, rather than grappling seriously with his wife’s infidelity. He’s keeping himself at too far a distance from his experiences to move past them, which may explain why he latches on to a younger man who, contrastingly, lacks control over his emotions.
But there is redemption in Drive My Car, and it comes in the form of Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), a young girl hired as Yusuke’s driver, who has a tragic past of her own. Their bond, like everything in this film, is too multifaceted for easy description, although certainly relevant is that she seems to be about the age that Yusuke’s daughter would have been. But for me the turning point in the movie comes when Misaki relates how her abusive mother would at times embody a childishly sweet persona at odds with her usual behavior. Misaki formed a bizarre connection with this persona—“She was my only friend”—but later took no action to save her mother from being crushed in a landslide. Like Yusuke regarding his wife, Misaki can’t explain her actions toward her mother, nor whether the shared moments of love were real or merely a strained farce.
After Misaki’s tale, Yusuke becomes emotional and pines to see his wife again, expressing regret for his detached behavior and attributing it to his fear of losing her. Later, he reclaims the titular role in his play, no longer so removed from his feelings. Something in Misaki’s story of her mother has struck a chord in him. Perhaps it’s Misaki’s gentle tolerance of duplicity and artifice, which she views as a kind of pained authenticity. One thing is clear: Yusuke’s character arc demands a level of focused analysis that requires more than one viewing.
This has become less a review than a meditation on Drive My Car’s themes, which typically happens when I write about my favorite nominee of the year: Roma in 2019, Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood in 2020, The Father in 2021. As with my write-ups for all of these great films, there’s so much to Drive My Car that I’ve left untouched. I admit that I found myself wishing that the middle section of this film was condensed, and viewers unused to ponderous three-hour movies will likely relate. But art doesn’t exist to grant our wishes, only to create an effect, and the effect of this film is to focus our attention, dreamlike, on the things we like to avoid: loss, secrets, randomness, and even rage against the ones we love.
Murakami, I’m sure, must be proud.
–Jim Andersen
For more movie reviews of great movies, check out my review of Nightmare Alley.