by RYAN CHAPMAN
Youtube “Two years after his wife’s unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a renowned stage actor and director, receives an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya at a theater festival in Hiroshima. There, he meets Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), a taciturn young woman assigned by the festival to chauffeur him in his beloved red Saab 900. As the production’s premiere approaches, tensions mount amongst the cast and crew, not least between Yusuke and Koji Takatsuki, a handsome TV star who shares an unwelcome connection to Yusuke’s late wife. Forced to confront painful truths raised from his past, Yusuke begins – with the help of his driver – to face the haunting mysteries his wife left behind. Adapted from Haruki Murakami’s short story, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is a haunting road movie traveling a path of love, loss, acceptance, and peace. Winner of three prizes at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, including Best Screenplay.” https://drivemycar.film/
About halfway through Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s three-hour film someone asks Y?suke Kafuku, an actor and theater director, why he didn’t cast himself as the titular character in his production of Uncle Vanya. “Chekhov is terrifying,” he replies. “When you say his lines, it drags out the real you.”
Kafuku, played with unyielding stoicism by Hidetoshi Nishijima, has good reason to hide his real self. He’s still grieving the loss of his young daughter, and his interlocutor in this scene is K?ji Takatsuki, a volatile young actor who had an affair with Kafuku’s wife Oto shortly before her death. Takatsuki doesn’t realize that Kafuku knows about the infidelity. What’s more, Kafuku has cast him as Vanya—which the young hotshot is plainly unsuited for—in a multilingual stage production in Hiroshima. Is the cuckold tormenting his dead wife’s lover? Using the play to interrogate something darker about his marriage?
If this sounds like melodrama, Hamaguchi has declared his love of the genre. But this isn’t Douglas Sirk or Pedro Almodóvar. The plot machinations are subdued, stretched out—an acoustic cover of a pop earworm. For Hamaguchi, tone supersedes plot, and an actor’s face always says more than a line of dialogue.
The film is adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami, from 2014’s Men Without Women. Kafuku is a typical Murakami protagonist: He listens to classical music on vinyl, smokes cigarettes, and finds women’s motivations utterly opaque. (Thankfully there are no cats or wells.) Murakami has achieved the level of international fame where Knopf is publishing what is essentially an IG grid of his closet. From the evidence of Drive My Car and Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (2018), Murakami’s short fiction seems an untapped reservoir for adaptation. (Seriously, watch Burning.) Approach Drive My Car as you would a stage play, with your phone in airplane mode.
Drive My Car, which won three awards at the Cannes Film Festival, patiently follows Kafuku through the casting, rehearsals, and premiere of Uncle Vanya.
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