There are many visuals from Hamaguchi Ryusuke’s Drive My Car that stick in the mind after viewing. This is a testament to the film’s unassuming self-confidence; it is a movie that seems almost purposefully unshowy, where long shots of a red Saab in motion down nondescript Japanese highways meld one into another.
Clocking in at a hefty 3 hours, the film is the definition of unhurried. As it inches along at the legal speed limit, one scene seems to blend into the next. And yet, upon finally exiting the theater, you find so much that is memorable. Chief among them is a simple scene: our protagonist, Yūsuke (Nishijiima Hidetoshi), and the young driver foisted upon him (Miura Toko), drive through the night in seaside Hiroshima Prefecture. The sunroof is retracted, and the two, enjoying a smoke, have their hands resting with their cigarettes exposed to the air. Soft embers offer a pinpoint of color against the dark sky; just as throughout the film, Yūsuke’s red Saab offers a pinpoint of color in the monochromatic grey of Japan’s transit infrastructure.
Modern Critical Darling
Drive My Car isn’t exactly the type you’d usually expect to break through international barriers and emerge into popular conversation in counties like the USA. Beyond its prodigious length, it has that usual kiss of death for American theater-goers: it’s subtitled (and in a non-European language, no less). Yet, break through it has; in addition to taking home the Golden Globe for best foreign-language film, the movie is only the sixth film ever to be named Best Picture by all three major US critics groups. (The Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the New York Film Critics Circle, and the National Society of Film Critics). And then there are the Oscar nominations. The movie is up for Best International Feature Film, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Director (for Hamaguchi), and even Best Picture. This last marks the first time a Japanese film has had that specific honor. (Which is a bit silly, given how many Japanese films rank among the best ever made).
Another Moment for Asian Cinema
Drive My Car comes at a moment when Asian film is experiencing a bit of a renaissance in the US, with Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite having won Best Picture two years ago. Korean cinema, like all things Korean, is booming abroad. Japanese film, by comparison, could be seen as in a bit of a slump; Japan spent over five decades following Kurosawa‘s Rashomon (1950) as the prime critical locus for Western cinephiles looking beyond North American and European shores. These days, however, few Japanese live-action movies by directors not named Kore-eda seem to make much of a splash outside of Japan. Even Kore-eda’s own heart-breaking Shoplifters (万引き家族, 2018) likely received less attention than it deserved.
So, it’s good to see a deserving film like Drive My Car generate some real attention and buzz. Perhaps some of that attention stems from the story’s source of adaptation. Hamaguchi Ryusuke and Oe Takamasa based their Oscar-nominated screenplay on the eponymous short story by none other than international literature darling Murakami Haruki. Easily the most internationally famous living Japanese author, Murakami’s themes and tropes resonate throughout the film; which is interesting, given just how much the lengthy movie adds to the 48-page short story.
Essentially only the basic structure and character background are maintained; Yusuke is an actor mourning a wife with whom he had a complicated relationship, and shares character-revealing conversations with a taciturn young woman driver from Hokkaido. Locations have been shifted, exchanging Tokyo for Hiroshima as the primary setting; a barely-mentioned play Yusuke is preparing for in the short story becomes one of the primary focuses of the film’s runtime. Even the car featured is somewhat different. The short story primarily takes place within the confines of a yellow Saab 900 convertible; the film instead features a red Saab 900 Turbo, thought to be more striking when placed against Japan’s highways and byways.
Drive My Car is Placid, But Grief Lurks Below
The film is a series of seemingly simple, peaceful moments, underneath which lurks the dark specter of trauma and grief. Walking the knife’s edge of justifying such a long runtime, Drive My Car slowly invites you deeper into its world of the meaningful mundane. Before you know it, you’ve gone from a sense of mild boredom to hanging on its every word of dialogue. The first forty minutes are essentially all one big prologue. The opening credits, shockingly, start when many films would be halfway done with their runtime.
Those first forty minutes, spent with Yūsuke and wife Oto (Kirishima Reika, in a strong performance) feel almost like an exercise in magical realism. Yūsuke is an actor; Oto is a screenwriter. She finds her narrative inspiration in their post-coital embrace, enumerating newly conceived plot points to Yūsuke as he drifts towards sleep. (A Murakami-style set-up if ever I heard one, using elements from his short story “Scheherazade.”)
Yūsuke spends long hours driving back and forth from the sterile highway environs of Narita Airport, a good hour and a half drive. The highways are spotless, clean, unbusy. The camera lingers on the red car passing through this expanse of nondescript national infrastructure. Time is given for the viewer to contemplate; I find myself thinking about Narita, and how far removed these images are from the titanic civic battle once fought over the confiscating of farmers’ lands to build the airport itself. Just like in the film itself, troubling emotions and thoughts remain beneath Narita’s sterile exterior. Many scenes in the movie are like this, allowing us to both consider the setting, the characters, the framing – but leaving enough time for other, outside thoughts to filter in.
Dreamlike but Oh-So-Real
The general effect is to create a film that is placid, but not languid. Much of the runtime consists not only of time spent in the eponymous car, but also on an international production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Mentioned only briefly in the short story, the play – featuring an international cast speaking dialogue in their own languages – becomes an additional layer to the film’s theme of our inability to ever truly make our feelings known to others. Moments when the film suddenly shifts to other languages are played quite well; Hamaguchi avoids the common pitfall of unintentionally hilarious English in otherwise great films like Shin-Godzilla (2016). The cast for this production-within-a-production is great, and allows for a much more expansive storytelling experience than Murakami’s source material.
Drive My Car is a movie that deserves to be experienced on its own level, taken in slowly, like the smooth whiskey favored by Murakami himself. The themes of miscommunication, of lost opportunities to say what needs to be said, will resonate with many in its audience. Deeper still is a sense of grief, and how we continue living on after those moments we can seem forever trapped in. The Oscar buzz is exciting, but seeing a film this good again coming out of Japan – that’s more exciting still.
