From its opening moments, Drive My Car welcomes us into its richly layered storytelling style with an ethereal display of an artist’s creative process. The film begins with a near dreamlike sequence that takes place between Oto (Reika Kirishima) and her husband Yūsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) just after the couple have made love (when Oto’s creativity as a television screenwriter is at its peak). As they lie in bed, Yūsuke is in awe of his wife’s creativity and helps coax an ever-growing story about a lovelorn teenager from her. Their collaboration continues in the car as the doting husband drives his loving wife to work while her story unfolds even further. All seems blissful between the pair, and it is for a time.
Thus begins Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s wonderful meditation on the lives and regrets we’re forced to leave behind if we ever hope to have a future worth living. With very little flash or pomp, Drive My Car (based on the short story by Haruki Murakami) explodes time and again with such immense amounts of revelatory humanity that one can’t help but feel crushed and uplifted at once. There’s a lot of hurt carried around by its players, and getting at that pain, uncovering it and making it bare, doesn’t come easy for them. Thankfully, guided by Hamaguchi’s observant hand, we’re invited to join this delightful journey of loss and discovery.
The love between Yūsuke and Oto never fades, even after her unexpected death and revelations of her infidelity. To help cope, Yūsuke crawls into ritual, which includes driving his car while listening to a cassette tape of his late wife reciting the lines of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya – a play he is famous for acting in. Eventually Yūsuke takes a job at a small theater company in Hiroshima (a city suffering its own substantial loss) directing Uncle Vanya, but refuses to act in it. Further, the company insists that he use a hired driver to cart him around, robbing him of his ritual retreat into the past. This driver, a young woman named Misaki (Toko Miura), is soft-spoken and direct, but also guarded and withdrawn. Like Yūsuke, she holds onto a grief that won’t allow her to emotionally move forward, even if the car they share does so literally.
Over time, the passenger/driver, boss/employee dynamic breaks down and each slowly reveals the anguish and guilt they’ve been holding onto. They do so not as an outpouring of soul-baring emotion, but rather after carefully tailored chipping away of the walls they’ve built around themselves. This breakdown of defenses doesn’t come from badgering or pestering, but from a natural progression of finding commonality in an unknown future. And it takes time. At three hours, Drive My Car is a commitment, but it never feels overlong. Scene after scene is in service to the next as each character helps guide our forlorn principles to their much needed confessions through earnest, philosophical interactions. Everyone has a story to tell, after all, and sometimes the simple act of sharing it with someone else is what’s needed to move one out of their past and into thier future.
James is a writer, record collector, wrestling nerd, and tabletop gamer living with his family in Asheville, North Carolina. He is a member of the Southeastern Film Critics Association, the North Carolina Film Critics Association, and contributes to The Daily Orca, Razorcake Magazine, Mountain Xpress, and Asheville Movies.