Not P but Murakami & Hamaguchi's car...certain kinds of spoilers here so you might ignore

[Mark Kohut]

DRIVE MY CAR, a NEW YORKER film review for a movie no one can see anywhere.
Try!
When credits are placed unconventionally in movies, it’s usually a matter
of flashy style, but in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new film, “Drive My Car,”
opening on Wednesday, it’s a matter of dramatic substance. The credits
don’t turn up until about forty minutes into the movie, which runs a minute
shy of three hours; they mark the border between prelude and action. It’s a
long setup, and it might have been exasperating if not for Hamaguchi’s
suave sense of melancholic style, marked by a luminous yet cold fluidity,
like a limpid stream of water that stings.
“Drive My Car,” based on a story by Haruki Murakami, is a movie about
artists and their many forms of collaboration—cursed and blessed,
inescapable and ill-chosen, behind the scenes and on public display,
affably professional and ineffably intimate. It’s one of the great movies
about the continuity of art and life, about the back-and-forth flow between
personal relationships and artistic achievements—and about the artifices
and agonized secrets on which both depend. The story begins with a
fortysomething married couple at home in Tokyo, a TV screenwriter named Oto
(Reika Kirishima) and her husband, Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), an actor
and stage director. Oto has a peculiar creative process: she tells stories
while she and Yusuke have sex, and the next morning Yusuke recites them
back to her. She then fleshes the stories out, but if she’s stuck on a
detail she leaves it to be completed in another sexual brainstorm. Whatever
works. In any case, a complication arises when Yusuke, returning home
unexpectedly one day, finds her in bed with another man. (He sneaks out
silently without interrupting the lovers.) Then, on the very day that Oto
is preparing Yusuke for a serious talk about their relationship, she dies,
suddenly, of a cerebral hemorrhage. Two years later, he’s invited to direct
a production of “Uncle Vanya,” the play he was starring in when she died,
at an arts festival in Hiroshima. The credits feature Yusuke at the wheel
of his beloved car, driving from Tokyo to Hiroshima, to begin the project
that makes up the core of the movie’s action.
There’s something about the car, a red Saab 900, that stands out: its
steering wheel is on the left—which is unusual in Japan because driving
there is done on the left side of the road. Not only is Yusuke deeply
attached to his car, for unspecified and ostensibly sentimental reasons;
he’s deeply attached to driving it, because doing so is an essential part
of his own artistic process. When he was preparing to star in “Uncle Vanya”
before Oto’s death, she recorded for him the entire play minus his
character’s lines on a cassette tape so that he could practice delivering
them as he drove. But, when Yusuke arrives in Hiroshima, the festival
organizers tell him that, for insurance reasons, he can’t do his own
driving; they’ve hired a driver for him, a young woman from a troubled
background named Misaki (Tôko Miura), and she’ll be chauffeuring him
between the theatre and his hotel. He’s displeased—he had picked a hotel an
hour away, to preserve his time for rehearsing with the tape—but he has no
choice. As a result, he has to change his method, working with the tape in
Misaki’s company and, inevitably, developing a personal relationship with
her—which, of course, ultimately inflects his art as well as his life.
Yusuke’s audacious methods become apparent from the first day of auditions.
Working with a company manager named Yuhara (Satoko Abe) and a Korean
dramaturge named Yoon-su (Dae-young Jin), he brings Japanese actors
together with those from many other Asian countries—Taiwan, the
Philippines, South Korea—all of whom perform in their first language. A
Korean actress named Yoon-a (Yoo-rim Park), who is mute, plays her role in
Korean Sign Language. Moreover, Yusuke’s direction of them begins with
sitting around a table and merely running the lines inexpressively. (This
is a method the French call rehearsing “à l’italienne,” and which the great
French director Jean Vilar defined as “the body at rest and the ass in the
chair.”) The cast chafes at this process, but, as Yusuke makes clear, he’s
not at all concerned with the actors’ pleasure in their work. When one
woman tells him that they’ll “do better” if he explains his interpretation
of the script, he responds, “You don’t have to do better. Just read the
text.”
Text is one of Hamaguchi’s obsessions, and the core of his art. In his best
films—such as his five-hour masterwork, “Happy Hour”—he gives language a
seemingly visible, physical presence. In “Drive My Car,” the text of
Chekhov’s play (both recited by Oto and performed by the cast in
rehearsals) forms a kind of running commentary and internal monologue.
Sometimes, it’s used with a wry irony, as when the line “If you only knew
how miserable I am!” corresponds to Yusuke’s discovery of Oto’s infidelity,
or when “You are my most bitter enemy” matches up with the imposed presence
of Misaki in his car. Other times, the effect is far more intimate, as
when, at a critical moment in his relations with the cast, Yusuke hears
Oto’s recording of the lines “Will you tell me the whole truth? . . . More
frightening is not knowing it.” The very questions of truth and
self-deception are what keep Yusuke from playing the titular role in the
Hiroshima production himself. As he explains to the actor whom he has cast
in the role, “When you say his lines, it drags out the real you. Don’t you
feel it?” He adds, “I can’t bear that anymore.”
The reason for his guarded vulnerability emerges in the course of the film.
“Drive My Car” is, first and foremost, an overwhelmingly powerful tale of
guilt and confession. In extraordinarily self-revealing monologues
delivered during his car rides with Misaki, or in the company of his cast
and crew, Yusuke describes the tense, fragile bond that existed between him
and Oto. His colleagues similarly unburden themselves to him with tales of
personal failings, betrayals and deceptions, and piercingly discerning
observations and accusations. (Misaki, whose work as a driver turns out to
be a sort of painfully won calling, is as vitally confessional and
observant as the artists.) Hamaguchi turns the film’s searing monologues
into moments of cinematic power. The characters’ words ring out grandly to
fill, even to transform, the luminously filmed settings—the cityscapes and
the vast rural vistas—in which they’re delivered. These scenes, which come
late in the action, are both elaborately long and dramatically climactic:
thrillingly intense payoffs for the carefully built fabrications that
underpin them.
Once they’re voiced, these stories seem to flow immediately back into the
production of “Uncle Vanya,” which deepens, layer by layer, as its
participants—including, in her way, Misaki—bare their souls to one another.
One of those colleagues plays a special, sensitive role in the proceedings:
a young actor named Takatsuki (Masaki Okada) whom, to his surprise and that
of the entire company, Yusuke casts in the role of Uncle Vanya. Avoiding
spoilers, I’ll say that “Drive My Car” turns out to be perhaps the most
potent film I’ve ever seen on the subject of a so-called cancelled man.
Takatsuki, a former star of TV and movies, is out of work following an
accusation of sexual relations with a minor. (He claims that he was
“framed.”) Yusuke hires Takatsuki nonetheless, telling him that his lack of
self-control is “socially bad” but that it’s “not bad for an actor.” In the
course of the rehearsals, Takatsuki soon commits a serious crime, and
Hamaguchi’s anguished point is clear: by truncating Takatsuki’s needed
period of reflection, repentance, and self-improvement, Yusuke is guilty of
gross irresponsibility, even complicity in the crime. After Takatsuki’s
arrest, Yusuke must rescue the production by overcoming his hesitation and
stepping into the role of Uncle Vanya at the last minute—and his
performance and his production is darkly shadowed by his guilt.
The concluding sequence, set on the play’s opening night—in which the text
is rendered, in all of its written languages, on a huge screen above and
behind the actors—is one of the great movie scenes of theatrical
performance. It’s dominated not by Yusuke but by Yoon-a, who, in sign
language, renders the words of the play all the more powerful through the
eloquence of her gestures, the grace of her presence, and the monumentality
of silence. Yet this sublime, redemptive ending nonetheless rings somewhat
hollow. Hamaguchi’s exaltation of art and its inextricable source in guilt
leaves his characters and his spectators hanging; the charge that he plants
in the first act never goes off, and he fails to fully dramatize the
implications of his own observations—namely, the very nature of the guilt
in question, the gap between the seemingly existential kind arising from
Yusuke’s relentless self-scrutiny and his manifestly practical moral
irresponsibility, and the question of whether Yusuke himself recognizes it.
In that sense, “Drive My Car” is an exemplary case of formal artifice and
cathartic emotion getting in the way, and leaving even one of the most
discerning and thoughtful of filmmakers behind the wall of a classicism of
silent and noncommittal ambiguity that the best modern films have broken
through.