Fathoming Life Through Art: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ‘Drive My Car’ (2021)
Film Analysis in 10 Slides
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OSCAR & AWARDS AT CANNES
Drive My Car won the Oscar for the Best International Feature Film in 2022. In 2021 at Cannes, it competed for the Palme d’Or and won three awards including the Best Screenplay. The film had its India premiere at the Bengaluru International Film Festival — BIFFes 2022.
HARUKI MURAKAMI’S STORY
The film is mainly based on the Haruki Murakami short story of the same name from his collection “Men Without Women” (2014). In the Murakami story, a widowed actor Kafuku is driven around Tokyo by Misaki as his driving license was suspended after he caused a minor accident due to drinking and a blind spot in his eyesight. Kafuku practices his lines for the role of Vanya in Chekhov’s play “Uncle Vanya” during the car rides. He tells Misaki about his wife of twenty years and her extramarital affairs. He was unable to fathom his wife’s motives behind her affairs which he calls as a “blind spot”. He even befriended a young actor Takatsuki, her last lover with the intention of punishing him. But Kafuku realized that Takatsuki truly loved his wife and ended up liking him.
FILM ADAPTATION
Director Hamaguchi elaborated on the Murakami story by drawing from some other stories in Murakami’s “Men Without Women” collection. The screenplay writers Ryusuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe must be credited for creatively using Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” as an integral part of the film for facilitating Kafuku to try and make Takatsuki reveal something about his affair with his wife. Kafuku is also the director of the play which has an international cast somewhat like Peter Brook’s “Mahabharata”. In the “Uncle Vanya” production in the film, the foreign actors can deliver in their own languages including the Korean sign language. During a trip to the chauffeur Misaki’s childhood home in Hokkaido, she confesses letting her mother die. Kafuku reveals that he could have saved his wife.
STRUCTURE
Drive My Car is in three parts. There is an almost 40 minutes long prologue covering Kafuku and his wife ending in her death. The epilogue runs for hardly 2 minutes showing Misaki in South Korea. The rest of the three-hour long film is set in Hiroshima where Kafuku conducts the rehearsals and the staging of “Uncle Vanya”. This part includes a trip to Hokkaido by Kafuku and Misaki.
The dialogues of various characters of the Chekhov’s play — except that of Vanya — have been recorded by Kafuku’s wife Oto in her voice in a cassette which is played in Kafuku’s car with Vanya’s lines recited by Kafuku. (Chaitanya Tamhane’s The Disciple (2020) comes to mind). This keeps taking us to Chekhov’s world for the most part of the film as a counterpoint to the present, enlightening it.
HAMAGUCHI’S EARLIER WORK
Director Hamaguchi started making films from 2001 with his short Go to the Movies. He has mentioned his feature films Passion (2008), Intimacies (2013) and the Tohoku trilogy of documentaries (2011) he co-directed as his notable work before he made the more than five-hour long Happy Hour (2015) for which he is known. Happy Hour came out of the improvisational acting workshop he conducted for non-professionals. The participants were asked to listen to each other. With many of them acting in the film, they had to be given sizable roles. The film’s script had to be revised many times. We can see the effect of Happy Hour in Drive My Car which has well rounded characters. Unlike what happens normally, the chauffeur Misaki has a sizable role in the film.
LISTENING TO THE TEXT
Kafuku exhorts his actors to focus on the text. All they have to do is read it. He believes that the text has the power to make it happen. This runs counter to the style of method acting practiced by a number of actors in American cinema. The method acting uses the technique of empathizing with the characters the actors are enacting emotionally. It is based on the system of acting developed by the Russian theater director Stanislavski who staged Chekhov’s plays. The style that Kafuku advocates in the film is refreshingly different.
CREATIVE USE OF CHEKHOV’S PLAY
In this film adaptation of Murakami’s story, Kafuku chooses Takatsuki to play Vanya much to the surprise of the cast and the organizers. Even Takatsuki wonders why Kafuku doesn’t want to play the role and casts him instead. Kafuku tells him how Chekhov is terrifying and brings out the “real you”. He can’t bear it anymore. He tells Takatsuki that the text is questioning the actor. He advises him to yield to it and respond to it. Having Kafuku cast Takatsuki in the role of Vanya is a masterstroke by the screenwriters. Thanks to the terrifying Chekhov, in a reading of the play by the cast, Takatsuki as Vanya is made to confess in front of Kafuku that he is in love with the Professor’s wife Yelena. This is reminiscent of the affair he and Oto had.
THE ENDING
Most people have interpreted the ending as a result of Kafuku deciding to forget the past by giving away his red Saab to Misaki who leaves Japan to make a fresh start in South Korea. But there are other details such as the Covid mask Misaki is wearing and the presence of the pet dog of the Korean actress Lee Yoo-na. Connecting all the dots, after the glorious end of the stage play with Sonya and Vanya, perhaps there time has come and in an anticlimax, Lee Yoo-na and Kafuku who play these roles are no more thanks to Covid. Before dying, their dog and the car were perhaps given away to Misaki. It is not entirely gloomy as the scar on Misaki’s face has gone away!
CLOSING THOUGHTS
Hamaguchi’s experience derived from the improvisational acting workshop he conducted resulting in the film Happy Hour, has helped Drive My Car greatly. Hidetoshi Nishijima as Kafuku, Tōko Miura as Misaki, Masaki Okada as Takatsuki, Reika Kirishima as Oto, and Park Yu-rim as Lee Yoo-na give memorable performances.
The screenwriters get rid of Takatsuki at some point to have Kafuku pressurized to play Vanya. The mere thought of having to play the Chekhov character leads to Kafuku taking a look at himself deeply at Hokkaido. It’s a sign that he has accepted to play the role once again. Drive My Car takes up the Murakami story of the protagonist attempting to unravel the mystery of his wife’s affairs and elevates it to the level of fathoming one’s own life through art, using the play by the “terrifying Chekhov” to look inward.
