Take the scenic route
‘Drive My Car’ a mysterious and haunting journey
Ajazzy, novelistic work of art, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s three-hour “Drive My Car” has racked up several critics year-end awards deservedly.
An adaptation of Haruki Murakami’s (longish) short story of the same, Beatles-centric name, the film showcases the performance of Japanese leading man Hidetoshi Nishijima (“The Wind Rises”) as Yusuke Kafuku, a newly middle-aged actor, director and writer, who discovers that his beautiful wife, a fellow writer, has been cheating on him shortly before she dies.
In fact, he catches her and her lover, a young actor, in the act (pun intended), although he does not confront them.
Yusuke owns a vintage red Saab 900 convertible, a sculpture on wheels, upon which he dotes. The action begins with Yusuke’s wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) telling him a story, invoking Sheherazade, the storytelling heroine of “1001 Arabian Nights,” who strives to evade the ax.
Yusuke’s last acting gig was in a Japanese adaptation of Irishman Samuel Beckett’s enigmatic masterpiece “Waiting for Godot.” Two years later, Yusuke’s work will take him to Hiroshima, a place teaming with ghosts, where he will direct a production of Chekhov’s semiautobiographical stage classic “Uncle Vanya,” with a multilingual cast, including a non-speaking Korean actor using sign language and the slightly down-on-his-luck, troubled young actor who had the affair with Oto.
Yusuke likes to listen to the plays he directs on tape, and the tapes he has of “Uncle Vanya,” a play also full of ghosts, were recorded for him by Oto. Thus, “Drive My Car” collects its characters, references, human and phantom voices and weightily laden location as if assembling for a seance. Whose spirit are they trying to summon?
Art is often a summoning of the dead. “Drive My Car,” which boasts a plaintive score by Eiko Ishibashi, suggests that in more ways than I could keep track of.
Yusuke appears to accept the idea that his late wife took lovers. He and she were happy together, and he was her husband, not just a lover. They had a daughter, who died when she was 4, a tragedy that may have caused a rift. Because he has been banned from driving, Yusuke is assigned a driver in Hiroshima. She is a young, uncommunicative woman with a sad, boyish face named Misaki (Toko Miura). We will learn later that her family was swept away by a landslide several years earlier, and in a scene evoking “Manchester by the Sea,” we visit the spooky lot where her house once stood.
The idea of life as a rehearsal and a performance leading inevitably to an end is inescapable.
Identity is entirely fluid, especially when you are actors upon a stage playing other people. We take a tour with Yusuke and Misaki, the film’s odd couple, of Hiroshima, visiting a recycling factory, an amusing reference to reincarnation, perhaps, and the Hiroshima cenotaph, a symbol of those killed by the bomb.
Director and co-writer Hamaguchi (“Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy”), fills “Drive My Car” with mysterious and haunting moments. The film is both spiritual and intellectual, summoning among other things the line from Sonya’s “Uncle Vanya” monologue, “We shall bear patiently the burdens that fate imposes on us.” In other words, drive.
(“Drive My Car” contains a sexually suggestive scene and mature themes.)