“The melancholy unity between the living and the dead” (James Joyce, “The Dead”)
Japan’s entry into the 2022 Oscars, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, is a three-hour romance of quiet sentiment, depicting celebrated actor and director Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a cool 47-year-old happily married to successful TV writer Oto (Reika Kirishima). Their love is intense enough to last the whole movie, if only in recollection after she dies, and he thinks about their relationship, which was highlighted by her ability to drum up erotic short stories when she, astride him, is about to have orgasm.
Less exotic is his growing appreciation of assigned driver Misaki (Tôko Miura) during his theater-directing job. Writer-director Hamaguchi and writer Takamasa Oe craft an intricate story of Yusuke’s grief as he travels to enlightenment with the taciturn help of Misaki, whose own tale of grief helps him reconcile with his wife’s absence.
Yusuke’s professional reticence makes his relationships with his actors a fascinating distributed exposition in which he quietly coaches and admonishes them in equal measure. Along the way we learn about acting.
Throughout he tries to reconcile his wife’s many adulteries with his willingness to accept them as his price for keeping her when she was alive and later in his memory. His reconciliation with his not confronting her about the infidelities is another chapter in his ongoing confession and purgation.
Drive My Car is no simple rom-com; in fact, there is no comedy, just an eccentric romantic connection between the living and the dead (see Joyce’s opening quote), that keeps the aud enthralled with characters even during lengthy rides in Yusuke’s vintage red Saab, those journeys being at once indulgent and overly long to figurative of his mental journey away from his grief.
Driving My Car is largely set in modern, if not somewhat bland, Hiroshima, which figuratively enhances the theme of reconstruction and reconciliation. His directing Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, while its own themes of problematic longings for a seductive young woman and home displacement aid the film’s theme of art’s possibly cathartic possibilities.
I fear I’m rambling, but, then, I’m trying to grapple with the story-writing prize at the latest Cannes and possible winner of an Oscar. It is one film that demands one revisit it for a fuller appreciation of its art and that you go at least once to see another example of Japan’s enduring contribution to classic world cinema.
Drive My Car
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy)
Screenplay: Hamaguchi, Takamasa Oe, from Haruki Murakami short story
Cast: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Toko Miura
Run Time: 2h 59m
John DeSando, a Los Angeles Press Club first-place winner for National Entertainment Journalism, hosts WCBE’s It’s Movie Time and co-hosts Cinema Classics. Contact him at JohnDeSando62@gmail.com
