Drive My Car Review: An Uncanny Investigation of the Materiality of Life

Based on the short story by Murakami Haruki, Hamaguchi Ryûsuke’s Drive My Car taps into the storytelling potential of objects with an indelible intensity, but only up to a point. Initially, Hamaguchi has us forge connections through inference as we’re introduced to a beautiful cosmopolitan couple whose work-and-play rituals fill them with palpable satisfaction. They seem too horny to be longtime partners and too invested in listening to classical music on vinyl to be living in our current century. They spend their time together making love and brainstorming ideas for supernatural television dramas. She voices them like loud moans only to forget them later, but he remembers every detail.

Eventually the audience learns that the woman, Oto (Kirishima Reika), is a screenwriter, and that the man, Kafuku (Nishijima Hidetoshi), is a stage actor and director, and that they’re both impossibly successful and complementary to each other’s lives. She records the lines of Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya on tape for him to listen to on his long commutes so that he can memorize his lines to perfection, and fill his red cocoon of a car with her lush and ghostly presence. The fact that this is accomplished in pure analog form and that the car is incongruously old is perhaps our first clue to the complexity, or even philosophy, of the film. Why would such contemporary lovers surround themselves with such anachronistic devices? Experiences such as the trauma of betrayal set the characters on a path of interwoven temporalities where moving forward and falling backward are anything but opposites.

Drive My Car repeats some of the same motifs that can be seen in Hamaguchi’s prior Asako I & II, such as references to Chekhov and the strange duplicity of lovers. But the protagonists couldn’t be more different in their approach to romance and life in general. (Oto, for one, is much closer to the voraciousness of Maggie Cheung in Olivier Assayas’s Irma Vep than to Asako’s submissive daintiness.) The pleasures to be had in Drive My Car lie mostly in its first act, when the layers of the film unfold with a voluptuous slowness and a sense that narrative endpoints are irrelevant. Oto and Kafuku live their posh lives with such ease and gusto, from loft to airport to hotel to corporate high-rise, that it’s as if they’re floating in space or enjoying a theme park ride. We’re allowed to simply scan the screen and bask in what we might call the characters’ urban mastery. It has never seemed so painless to live in Tokyo.

One example of the plot’s initially intransitive nature is how Kafuku reacts when he catches Oto cheating on him with a young man (Okada Masaki) in their living room. There’s no shouting, no confrontation, no rupture. Not even resentment. He briefly watches the action through a mirror and delicately slithers out of the room. It isn’t until he returns to the apartment only to find her dead body on the floor that the film shifts from a textural experience of how things happen to a more conventional account of what will happen next.

Two years after Oto’s death, Kafuku sets out to direct Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya in an artist-in-residence project in Hiroshima. He stays in an idyllic location on an island far from the theater where the rehearsals are to take place, so that he can practice with Oto’s taped voice during the commute. But he’s told that he’s not allowed to drive his own car for safety reasons and is offered an experienced driver, Misaki (Miura Tôko), a mysterious young woman with a scar on her face. He’s reluctant to allow Misaki to drive but eventually gives in.

The situation, of course, gives the film its title, and paves the way for uncanny moments where Misaki witnesses Kafuku listening to his deceased wife’s voice act out the lines of the play. Yet instead of allowing these scenes to brew and reveling in their metaphorical potential, Hamaguchi spends the rest of Drive My Car providing causal explanations for the misery of the characters and articulating the ways in which the irreversibility of death makes us all connected through regret and guilt. Hamaguchi’s acute attention to the storytelling power of surfaces and clothes (Kafuku’s turtlenecks, Takatsuki’s shimmering jackets) remains faultless but also diluted by the buzz-killing business of shedding light on the shady sides of characters whose opaqueness was what precisely made them so alluring in the first place.

The indelible through line of the film remains, in any case, the way Hamaguchi renders concepts like mourning and longing fleshly in incredibly sensuous fashion. And he does so through props that bring us close to the materiality of life and death: steely metal, thick fabrics, coarse linen, heavy snow, and bulky cassette tapes. Hamaguchi infuses in us the drama of textures and mood long before he tells us who the characters are, where they’re going, and where they’ve been. Suitcases covered in travel stickers, naked lovers bristling against bedsheets, a clunky automobile zipping across the Tokyo expressways, or a dead woman fallen to the ground are all shot as refreshing reminders that even the most elusive of feelings, or ghostly of presences, need the physical world to manifest themselves meaningfully.