In the largely Saab-bound short story “Drive My Car,” part of Haruki Murakami’s collection “Men Without Women,” an actor takes a job playing the title role in Anton Chekhov’s simple, profound comedy of thwarted passions, “Uncle Vanya.” (Few consider it funny, even in productions trying to be, but Chekhov classified it as a comedy.) The story largely unfolds as a series of conversations — officious at first, then gradually more unguarded — between the actor, whose wife has died, and his chauffeur, an isolated young woman most at home behind the wheel.
Those car-bound conversations remain central to co-writer and director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s exquisitely acted expansion of “Drive My Car.” But the film deepens Murakami’s scenario. It ventures into the minds and hearts of many other characters across several weeks, as they rehearse a play demanding the hardest thing a performer can achieve: simple honesty, and self-examination without indulgence.
Hamaguchi and his co-writer Takamasa Oe achieve much the same. The movie runs a minute under three hours, which sounds a little crazy for a 40-to-50 page story, depending on the translation. Yet its running time turns out to be both unhurried and unerring. So much happens, without conspicuous narrative engineering. What fleshes out “Drive My Car” and provides its stealth momentum comes from gradually revealed emotional information — scenes, before, during and after “Uncle Vanya” rehearsals, where a character opens up and we learn what’s making her or him tick, or withdraw, or yearn for understanding.
The short story glances on the protagonist’s past; the movie begins there, as present tense. In Hamaguchi’s version of Yusuke, played with exquisite control by Hidetoshi Nishijima, he is an actor-director. His screenwriter wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) relishes their lovemaking; in bed, ideas for stories pour out of her, naturally, in a stream of erotic consciousness. (This notion comes from another “Men Without Women” short story, ““Scherherezade.”)
It’s a fulfilling marriage with significant asterisks, as we learn. After this first section of “Drive My Car,” there’s a two-year jump ahead to Yusuke’s new circumstances: alone, grieving not one but two huge losses, haunted by the woman he knew so well yet so incompletely.
He has taken a job in Hiroshima as a guest director; as he says, he no longer has the inner resources to act in Chekhov himself. He’s staging a multilingual production of “Uncle Vanya.” The most famous of his cast members is a TV star (Masaki Okada) who — as the director knows all too well — was also one of his late wife’s lovers.
At one point the men share a ride home, and the camera takes in their anxious faces, as they speak directly to the camera. It’s akin to the piercing direct-to-camera dialogue between mother and daughter-in-law, among others, in Ozu’s “Tokyo Story,” pulling us suddenly closer to what’s roiling inside these two cautious souls.
There are moments in “Drive My Car” when the confessions sound a little less than spontaneous, and amid all the excellent additions to the story, I wonder if it would’ve been more truthful to stick with the reason the short story’s version of the protagonist needs a driver. (A drunk driving charge factors into that reason.) These are small matters, however, in a plainspoken, minutely observed triumph.
The directorial technique, like the cinematography, calls zero attention to itself, sometimes skirting conventional framing and lighting, but magically avoiding the obvious. In the later section of “Drive My Car” the story returns to driver Misaki’s story, as she and Yusuke travel to her mountain village, where a landslide destroyed her family home. There’s a story behind that story, too, which is true of nearly everyone and everything in this film. The actors playing the “Vanya” company perform in Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and sign language. This is how Yusuke, struggling to give voice to his doubts and heartbreak in private, prefers to rehearse a Chekhov play of missed connections and occasional, heartrending intersections.
For a century and more, film directors have explored crosscurrents between art and life, and how one informs the other. Hamaguchi makes that exploration a fully humanized one. His actors, one and all, are so good, you’re simply grateful for their screen company.
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‘DRIVE MY CAR’
4 stars (out of 4)
No MPAA rating (some sexual material and language)
Running time: 2:59
Where to watch: Now playing in theaters
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