‘DRIVE MY CAR’ MOTORS INTO HOUSTON
There is such a thing as good timing when it comes to programming film, even if some might choose to call it good luck. So it is that the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston chose “Drive My Car” as the centerpiece of its brief Japanese film series, well before both the New York Film Critics Association and the Los Angeles Film Critics Association chose it as the best film of the year. (Not the best international film. The best film, period.)
“Drive My Car,” screening Dec. 26, Dec. 30 and Jan. 2, isn’t the only attraction here. The MFAH also selected “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” another excellent new film by prolific “Car” director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, that screened last week; and “Labyrinth of Cinema,” a hyper-whimsical fantasy about three young men who enter the onscreen action at a movie theater (shades of Woody Allen’s “The Purple Rose of Cairo”), screening Dec. 31 and Jan. 1.
But “Drive My Car” is the one to seek out. Melancholic, pensive, yet somehow alive and hopeful, it’s a penetrating study of grief and art, and a reminder that some epics traverse the emotional landscape rather than outsized worlds.
Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami (from the collection “Men Without Women”), the film tells the story of Yasuke Kafuku (the superb Hidetoshi Nishijima), a theater director and actor married to an unfaithful television writer (Reika Kirihima). They have lost a child, and he quietly accepts her infidelities — we see him walk in on one of them and quietly leave the room — and when she dies suddenly, he burrows deep within himself.
He ends up accepting a position directing Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” at a theater festival across the country in Hiroshima.
One good stoic deserves another, and Yasuke finds himself slowly opening up to his Hiroshima driver, Misaki Watari (Tôko Miura). For Yasuke, the ride is a sacrament, the time when he goes over lines and enters the world of the play. As he slowly lets Misaki in, and gets to know her own grief, we are privileged to witness their unconventional communion.
“Drive My Car” is three hours long, but it seems to go by in the blink of an eye. Hamaguchi is a careful, acute observer of human nature, unafraid of long takes that draw viewers in and invite them to stay a while. He believes in cinema, and theater, as a
means of excavating the human soul. He’s not just interested in finding out what makes us tick. He wants to explore the reasons we stay alive. He’s up to something similar in “Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” an oddly titled tapestry of three jagged love stories that jut out in unexpected directions.
Awards are never a good enough reason to see a movie, but they can prompt the curious to find their way to the theater. “Drive My Car” appears to be of those crossover successes that finds its way into the mainstream culture, much as South Korea’s “Parasite” did in 2019. If I were a betting man, I’d put it down for a best picture Oscar nomination. And if that gives you a nudge in the film’s direction, all the better.