‘Drive My Car’ Film Review – The Hollywood Reporter

Japanese writer-director Ryusuke Hamaguchi takes a leisurely detour alongside the lonely highways of affection and loss, grieving and therapeutic in his newest Cannes competitors contender Drive My Car. Tailored from a brief story of the identical identify by globally feted Japanese writer Haruki Murakami, this intellectual highway film is an absorbing, technically assured piece of labor with poetic depths and novelistic ambitions.

However it is usually very gradual and ponderous, motoring alongside in low gear for a lot of its three-hour runtime. This torpid tempo is underscored when the delicate opening credit lastly seem virtually 40 minutes into the story. What’s previous is prologue, although it felt like half a film already. Given Marukami’s fondness for co-opting Beatles track titles, Drive My Automobile may equally have been referred to as The Lengthy and Winding Highway.

Hamaguchi final competed in Cannes three years in the past with the offbeat romantic fable Asako I & II, which premiered to typically cool evaluations. However his repute has since recovered, co-writing Kiyoshi Kurasawa’s interval thriller Spouse of a Spy, winner of the very best director prize on the 2020 Venice Movie Pageant, earlier than selecting up a Silver Bear himself on the 2021 Berlinale for his charming Tokyo triptych Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Pitched firmly at competition and art-house audiences, Drive My Automobile cements his blossoming repute as a talented auteur, although it’s unlikely to earn him an invite to direct the subsequent revved-up Quick and the Livid blockbuster.

Whereas Drive My Automobile is basically trustworthy to Murakami’s skimpy unique textual content, Hamaguchi has expanded the timeline, including further places, secondary characters, deeper backstory and a creditable stab at dramatic decision. Taking his cue from Murakami’s temporary reference to Uncle Vanya, he additionally elevates Chekhov’s melancholy stage traditional right into a recurring motif, repeatedly returning to Sonya’s closing speech about the necessity to stoically keep it up dwelling within the face of crushing disappointment. As Hamaguchi’s wounded protagonists embark on their very own emotional journey, this theme resonates with rising urgency.

Set in Tokyo, the primary act is a self-contained home tragedy. Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is an internationally acclaimed stage actor and theater director feted for his Chekhov and Beckett productions. He enjoys a deep, passionate connection along with his screenwriter spouse Oto (Reika Kirishima), who shares her newest half-dreamed plot concepts with him throughout their sensually offered intercourse classes.

The couple have survived private disaster, the dying of their solely daughter 20 years earlier than, plus minor medical points, together with Kafuku’s just lately identified glaucoma. This literal “blind spot” involves serve a metaphorical objective within the narrative when Kafuku returns dwelling unexpectedly someday to seek out Oto having intercourse with one among her actor colleagues, good-looking younger hothead Koshi (Masaki Okada). Slipping away unobserved, Kafuku then agonizes about whether or not to lift the topic along with his spouse, shunning her obvious makes an attempt at clearing the air. Earlier than any decision is feasible, Oto dies all of a sudden, taking her secrets and techniques to the grave.

Two years later, Kafuku is working at a theater competition in Hiroshima, directing an formidable polyglot manufacturing of Uncle Vanya. The forged will characteristic Japanese, Chinese language and Korean actors talking a number of languages, together with signal language. However the veteran actor declines to reprise the position of Vanya himself, fearing the emotional publicity. “Chekhov is terrifying,” he argues, “it drags out the true you.”

Pageant insurance coverage guidelines imply Kafuku should grudgingly hand over his beloved lipstick-red classic Saab automobile to his formally assigned driver Misaki (Toko Miura), a surly, taciturn, chain-smoking younger lady on the run from her personal traumatic household historical past. Their lengthy drives round Hiroshima slowly evolve from terse formal exchanges to painful, candid confessionals. This theme of strangers sharing tender secrets and techniques is current in Marukami’s unique story, but additionally in Hamaguchi’s earlier movies, notably Wheel of Destiny of Fortune. Because the director states in his Cannes press notes, vehicles are like impartial emotional buffer zones that encourage frank revelations, “intimate conversations which are solely born inside that closed-off, transferring area.”

An surprising arrival on the Uncle Vanya casting classes is Oto’s ex-lover Koshi, having just lately give up his profession as a TV pin-up underneath a cloud of scandal. He and Kafuku kind a clumsy camaraderie, bonding over their shared love of the identical lady with out ever fairly referring to the affair: “I consider Oto introduced us collectively,” Koshi claims.

Kafuku’s friendship with Koshi is basically a efficiency, the older man utilizing expert fakery to attempt to uncover deeper truths about his late spouse. However his slow-burn connection to Misaki proves extra emotionally revealing: two broken, deep-frozen souls who finally assist one another obtain some type of closure throughout a snowy pilgrimage to the far north of Japan.

Although nonetheless a comparatively younger film-maker at 42, Hamaguchi generally appears to undertake a starchy cinematic grammar extra suited to an older era of art-house auteurs. He definitely shoots Drive My Automobile with a rambling, long-form lassitude that drags in locations. Banal conversations, stilted monologues and prolonged theater rehearsals unfold in what looks like actual time, including loads of texture however scant dramatic import. Hidetoshi Shinomiya’s naturalistic cinematography is technically competent however largely unremarkable, whereas Eiko Ishibashi’s doleful jazzy rating is simply too thinly deployed.

That stated, Drive My Automobile has admirably severe intentions in its forensic anatomy of affection, grief and survivor’s guilt. Nishijima and Miura each give impressively internalized performances, every conveying hidden oceans of anguished depth through charged silences, haunted stares and opaque dialogue. The closing act additionally delivers a collection of grace notes, together with a elegant ultimate twist on Uncle Vanya and a cryptic COVID-era coda which teasingly suggests an ongoing connection between Kafuku and Masaki. There are poetic and profound rewards right here, even when Hamaguchi makes us wait too lengthy for this quietly devastating emotional pay-off.