“Chekhov is terrifying. When you say his lines, he drags out the real you.”

With these words, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s protagonist, the grief-stricken Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), may have deliberately hinted at his inner struggles and motivations more than any performance or non-performance on/off the stage of his could have revealed. Drive My Car is a three-hour-long road epic, and as the 180 minutes slowly unfolded, I realized that Kafuku had good reasons to hide his real self.


The opening scene is a woman’s monologue. A mysterious narrative. The narrator is Oto Kafuku (Reika Kirishima) and her figure is silhouetted against a window. This is a deliberate composition underscoring the unknown and mysterious motivations of the character herself. Until she tragically exits the story on the floor of their apartment, Oto’s schemes are shrouded in guilt, expressed via small talk, post-coitus monologues, and an extra-marital affair with Koji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), one of her husband’s casted actors. 

Yūsuke on the other hand masks his grief and disappointment (of his daughter’s death and impending blindness) with professional diligence to his work in the theatre.


Against this backdrop came the transition early in the film where the spinning wheels of Yūsuke’s car metamorphose into the spinning reels of Oto’s cassette tape on which she records her monologues. For a second the car wheels and the cassette reels become one, symbolizing the function of the voice on tape as the vehicle of Yūsuke’s journey. The voice is a constant presence everywhere the red car travels. And as it does, the film’s unassuming artistry begins to unfold albeit at a slow pace. Bright red amidst Hiroshima’s urbanity - highways and tunnels - Yūsuke’s 1987 Saab 900 Turbo is a symbol of solitude, of departure from the tragic past into the unknown, the creation of bonds and discovery of companionship in the present; beginning with the unnoticed reflection and glance in the rear mirror, then the close-up intensity of two people listening, first to one person, then to one another, as the mysteries and tragedies of both Yūsuke and Misaki (Tôko Miura), his driver, are unburdened and shared. 


This is where the film’s title is derived from. At a residency in Hiroshima, Misaki is assigned to shepherd Yūsuke every day from his hotel while he directs a multilingual adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. Yūsuke strongly objects to the imposition of this chauffeur on him and responds with a cold, detached reticence. And despite the voice of his wife speaking over the silence of the ride, Yūsuke’s energy remains one of wanting to be unquestioned. Misaki matches this energy with a professional silence of her own and limits her interaction to pressing play on Oto’s recording. 

Are the recordings stalling Yūsuke’s grief? Diverting his creativity? Is it wise to listen to that voice for hours each day? And in the presence of his new untrusted driver? It isn’t until after dinner at the house of Lee Yoo-na (Park Yu-rim) and his mute wife, Gong Yoon-soo (Jin Dae-yeon) that Yūsuke relaxes and trusts in the skill of his driver. As it turns out, Misaki’s driving is itself symbolic of her driving herself away from a past buried in the ruins of an old life along with an unloving mother.


Following the dinner, and entering the film’s final act, I observed that the air of servitude between driver and driven had been dismantled. Guided by Hamaguchi’s steady direction and the naturalistic cinematography of Hidetoshi Shinomiya, subtle yet profound imagery and symbolism is mined from what looks like ordinary actions.

Most notably the shot of the hands of Yūsuke and Misaki (Yūsuke is no longer in the back seat) extending their cigarettes out of the sunroof so as not to let the smoke permeate the sanctity of their vehicular mode of bonding and transition - a portrayal of their communion of newfound respect and unspoken companionship. Hands in this film are an allegory of empathy, loneliness, shared grief, intimacy, and friendship. 

Nowhere is the unspoken fellowship between Yūsuke and Misaki more telling than in Yūsuke’s request that Misaki take him to her childhood home in Hokkaido where her mother died. Misaki confesses that she could have saved her mother but chose not to. Yūsuke confides that he might have saved his wife had he not hesitated to go home to her. They comfort each other having fully unburdened each other’s guilt and grief, then return to Hiroshima as the curtains draw to a tender call.


In conclusion, Drive My Car, is a humanist epic transported from a Murakami short story and Men Without Women into an award winning film at Cannes (three awards) and also a dark horse contender for Best Picture at the next Academy Awards. Through it’s structure and writing, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, is in dialogue with such filmmakers from the French New Wave as Jacques Rivette and modernists like Charlie Kaufman a lá I’m Thinking of Ending Things. The audition scene brings back memories of Naomi Watts in David Lynch’s Mulholland Drive. And from the editing, mise-en-scene and long takes, the influence of the Turkish maestro, Nuri Bilge Ceylan is felt. Yet, Hamaguchi is a filmmaker in his own right and with Drive My Car, shares with us the existential comfort of having just one person in our lives with whom we can be our real selves.