In the year we got a ninth Fast and Furious movie, Japanese director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi gave us something at the very opposite end of the petrolhead scale with Drive My Car. You could call it Slow and Circuitous, but that would be doing his monumental, highly moving meditation on how life, art and desire intertwine a huge disservice. Vast in philosophical scope but intimate; beautifully controlled but pulsing with erotic undercurrents, it marks Hamaguchi’s emergence as a new cinematic master.
Liberally adapted from Haruki Murakami’s short story, it sees avant garde theatre director Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) mourning the death of his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) – whose infidelity he had just discovered. Accepting an assignment to direct a new multilingual production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima, he reluctantly consents to being chauffeured around by the taciturn Misaki (Tôko Miura). Every morning on the way to the theatre, he listens to a cassette recording of Oto’s voice running his lines. In taxing rehearsals, he encourages the actors to surrender themselves to Chekhov’s text – including Oto’s bad-boy former lover Koji, whom Kafuku has cast in some form of punishment as the self-doubting Vanya. Willingly or unwillingly, everyone is a passenger on a journey here.
Hamaguchi has been circling these themes for years – since his graduation feature Passion and on into the acclaimed Asako I & II: the ebb and flow of art and life, the revelatory effects of role-playing, how desire sculpts our identity from within. But in Drive My Car they all flow powerfully into each other: grieving for Oto, who used sex to unleash her creativity, Kafuku begins to confide in Misaki, and their new intimacy starts to dislodge her secrets. Using driving as a brilliantly concise metaphor for how storytelling, acting and loving all draw us towards unknown destinations certain to change us, Hamaguchi orchestrates his ideas with a cool and elegant insistency. Drive My Car’s red Saab 900 – weaving quietly through Hiroshima, and the expressways and byways of the human heart – deserves to be up there in the iconic movie symbol stakes with Rosebud the sledge.
