"Drive My Car": review

I'm still trying to process the strange, cerebral, meditative "Drive My Car," a 2021 film directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi; the title references the Beatles song, but the movie doesn't use it for copyright reasons. The film stars Hidetoshi Nishijima as Yusuke Kafuku, an actor-director married to his creative storywriter wife Oto (Reita Kirishima). 

The film's long prelude gives us an idea of the couple's strange marriage: Oto gets especially creative during sex, and she also quietly has sex with other, younger men. During such moments, with her husband or her other paramours, she brims with story ideas but needs someone to write them down for her. Yusuke is aware of her unfaithfulness, but he says nothing for fear of losing her. And bizarrely, as unfaithful as Oto is, she seems genuinely to love her husband. During this prelude, Oto tells Yusuke, in a serious way, that she wants to talk to him, but Yusuke, perhaps fearing something, delays coming home to Oto that day, and when he finally does come home, he finds Oto on the floor of their flat, dead from a sudden and catastrophic brain hemorrhage. I don't consider Oto's death a spoiler; that event is the setup for the rest of the film.

Fast forward to two years later, and Yusuke has been invited to take up a residency in Hiroshima, where he will stage and direct (and ultimately act in) a multilingual version of Chekov's Uncle Vanya. His initial team consists of two assistants, one of whom is Yoon-soo (Jin Dae-yeon), an ethnically Korean man who speaks Japanese, Korean, English, and Korean sign language. The actors Yusuke ends up casting in various roles for the play are from a variety of cultural and linguistic backgrounds: a Taiwanese English speaker, a couple Koreans who apparently don't speak much Japanese, and someone else whose vaguely Asian ethnicity I never quite figured out. All the actors are to perform in their native languages while multilingual "surtitles" will be projected on a screen above the stage. Yusuke is told he is not permitted to drive his own car; it's one of the conditions of the residency, rooted in insurance reasons because a previous resident got into a nasty accident. Instead of driving his own car, Yusuke will have a driver, 24-year-old Misaki Watari (Toko Miura).

The rest of the movie follows several subplots: the development of the play as the actors read through their lines and eventually block out their scenes; the developing, not-quite father/daughter relationship between Yusuke the bereaved husband and Misaki the taciturn driver; and Yusuke's relationships with various members of his team and members of the cast of Uncle Vanya. We discover that the Korean actress who speaks in Korean sign language (Lee Yoo-na) is actually Yoon-soo's wife: she didn't want any special advantages during the audition, so she kept her marriage to Yoon-soo a secret. We discover that the actor whom Yusuke hired to play Uncle Vanya may well have been one of Oto's lovers, but this never results in an angry confrontation. We learn that driver Misaki had an abusive mother who died during a mudslide that buried Misaki's house when she was 18, an event that has left Misaki riddled with guilt despite her conflicting feelings about her mother. Yusuke confesses to Misaki his own feelings of guilt about his wife's death: had he come home earlier instead of dithering out of fear, he might have been able to save her.

All of this takes place in a pastiche of static scenes inside rooms and in parks, and in dynamic scenes that take us through roving, rolling bits of the Japanese countryside (which looks a lot like the Korean countryside) in various seasons. The overall tone of the movie is as I said at the beginning: strange, cerebral, and meditative. To be honest, I came away thinking there was a lot, here, that I hadn't properly understood, and while that would normally tempt me to want to watch the movie a second time, I'm not sure I want to do that, either.

Not to say that "Drive My Car" is bad, and some of the symbolism is actually fairly easy to catch on a Psych 101 level. For instance: Oto and Yusuke had lost a daughter, years ago, when the girl was four, and it's obvious that Oto's creativity during sex has a metaphorical import: she's still trying to conceive and to give birth to something. These stories—including one in particular that's somewhat perverse—are her "children," in a way. Other symbols and clues were harder to catch because I'm not that familiar with Japanese culture, and Japanese culture, which I largely see through a resentment-tinged Korean lens (sorry, Japan), often comes off as a caricature to me. Unlike diarrhetically emotive Koreans in their dramas, the Japanese, at least in film, frequently seem like the Asian version of repressed Brits from cinematic works like "The Remains of the Day," i.e., outwardly stoic, not given to extreme outbursts, and only occasionally crying manful tears. The sexual weirdness of the film made me think of any number of equally wacko French dramas I've seen (if there's no sex, it isn't French, right?), but the film's emotional remoteness and desolation often felt hard to relate to, to decipher, and to penetrate. The play Uncle Vanya also serves to give the various subplots a structure to weave themselves into and through, and when we see, at the end of the film, the play's final scene being performed, we can understand, in that moment, that art reflects life reflects art: there are multiple layers of meaning in play.

So the whole story felt a bit... Continental for me, if that's the right word. Critics everywhere are raving about "Drive My Car," but as heartfelt and gentle and thoughtful as the film was, I ended up not feeling as deeply touched as I might have, and I say that as someone who normally feels it very deeply when I watch films about coping with bereavement. Most dramas about death and dying and loss leave me a blubbering mess, especially since the death of my own mother, but not "Drive My Car." I came away pensive, not sad.

I think another thing I found off-putting was how we were supposed to relate to people like Yusuke, a cuckold who's aware he's a cuckold, but who won't say anything to his wife about her infidelity out of fear that she'll leave him. I simply can't relate to that, and I ended up resenting this aspect of the film, which might, for all I know, also be a subtle criticism of Japanese culture in the way that woke Hollywood self-righteously sees itself as "speaking truth to power" as it constantly parodies tycoons and twisted trailer-park folks with their supposedly stunted morals and retarded-serial-killer culture. The existential problems visible in "Drive My Car" were hard to empathize with because I just can't imagine being in such a fucked-up relationship as Yusuke's. Yet the movie has a moment in which Misaki prods Yusuke to try to understand where his wife might have been coming from: her love for him was genuine and she needed the outlet provided by other men. I say fuck that. That's not a marriage: it's a sick travesty, but people have their artistic heads crammed so far up their artistic asses that they can't see that glaring fact.

Well, for what it's worth, if you're into slow-burn, European-style drama with interesting, simmering-below-the-surface characters, I think you'll appreciate "Drive My Car," perhaps more than I did. For me, though, I saw a movie that presented a series of opportunities for dramatic import, then failed to pull the trigger by paying those moments off, if I may use a "Chekov's gun" metaphor. I think this failure wasn't really a failure, though: it was deliberate, like the moment in "About Schmidt" where Jack Nicholson's repressed character finally has a chance to make the outburst that's been building inside him the whole film... then he takes a breath and refuses to give in to that impulse. In Nicholson's case, that moment worked because we, in the audience, have come to expect Nicholson to chew the scenery, and instead, his character shows amazing restraint. In this film, though, the relentless shell of repression cracks only at certain moments, producing, for me at least, a subtle-but-pervasive feeling of dissatisfaction, and that's why I have no desire to revisit this movie. Your mileage may vary.