by Jason Adams
I've never owned a car or enjoyed driving one, and the supposed romantic allure of that particular activity has always eluded me. I know some people find it a meditative state, a vacuum-sealed trance of sorts where you're both static and in motion at once, simply floating down the road, but it's an experience that's always sent me personally hurtling into a panic. Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), the leading man of writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new film Drive My Car screening at NYFF this weekend, would find my aversion nutty, and it's his love of long drives that ultimately forms the heart and deepest bond of this turns-out-to-be lovely and moving (in a multitude of ways) movie. It almost convinced me there's something to that whole driving thing! Almost.
Adapted from a short story from famed author Haruki Murakami Drive My Car is by no means a small road trip -- one minute shy of three hours Hamaguchi takes his time getting where he's taking us. And thankfully the destination's worth the time... the entire journey is, gifting us an accumulation of moments compounding moments, an eventual heart-aching avalanche of miniature emotional stakes finding force though one another. When the opening credits pop up at about the forty-minute-mark I'd already been entirely lulled into its slow and thoughtful state, so much so that it took a second to realize what was happening -- Oh, right! This is a movie! I'd already been entranced.
Yusuke is a famous stage actor and director who's married to Oto (Reika Kirishima), a well-established writer. The couple has recently lost a daughter and seem to be in their own state of disassociation from their surroundings -- their world reads airless, cold, even if their love at its center does seem genuine. Oto can only work out her stories after making love with her husband, spelling out surreal situations induced by orgasm -- that seems like a good sex life to me, at least! But Oto never fully comes down from her dreams, and goes looking for their continuations elsewhere -- after a flight gets canceled Yusuke stumbles upon his wife in the embrace of another man, pretty-boy popular actor Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), who he recognizes as his wife's plus-one at one of his performances.
Oto doesn't see her husband there, and he doesn't say anything, sneaking back out the door and checking himself into a hotel for the night -- silently, willingly, covering her tracks for her. When he returns several days later life goes on as normal, until Oto seems poised to break the couple's silence herself, but instead tragedy intervenes yet again. And Yusuke is sent even further into his self-imposed isolation, hermetically sealed up in his thoughts. It's not until a couple of years pass and he agrees to stage a new production of Uncle Vanya that he heads off to another small city, one buried under snow, and he's forced bit by bit to poke his head out from under his premature burial, reconnect with a slice of humanity along slow drives on indistinguishable stretches of road.
Like most people who ride in cars Yusuke has a ritual -- he listens to a recording of his wife reading the text of Uncle Vanya on his drives; a recording where she's left silent the moments where the Vanya role's lines would go. In a perfect moment of thematic confluence he says they timed this silence together, to exactly his own cadence -- Oto left just enough space for him and him alone to speak his lines. He keeps up with this ritual even after he's not acting in the show, and no doubt takes the job up north in order to have an excuse to continue it, and so when the theater tells him that they've hired him a driver, Misaki (Tôko Miura), because of insurance liability involving an earlier accident, he balks. His ritual is holy; this is an invasion of his process, his personal space.
The next two hours of the film see Hamaguchi methodically charting the course that Yusuke and Misaki will take, along the same roads back and forth and back and forth, to finding peace with one another, and in so doing with the outer world. Misaki herself leads an interiorized life after her own set of tragedies, and one of the shining pleasures of Drive My Car is watching the creeping ways that light and absolution find their ways onto both actor's faces -- smiles that at first seem heavy and uncommon begin infiltrating the place with startling frequency. Sometimes all it takes to get off the main drag and actually find momentum is a partner who needs it as bad as you do -- to paraphrase Vertigo only one person can wander; two people are always going somewhere. Drive My Car is worth every mile.
Drive My Car is screening at NYFF on October 3rd at 2:30pm and October 4th at 8:15pm.