Drive My Car (2021)
Review of Drive My Car / ドライブ・マイ・カー (2021), directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi
I had been wanting to watch Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car for months before it even released in the United States, but knew that because I did not live in Washington D.C. or New York City that I was going to have a tough time finding it where I live.
I am very familiar with Hamaguchi’s work, as I first discovered him with Asako I & II, although I didn’t really like that movie. But this movie was based off of a Murakami novel, which offers a certain standard already with the content and what it’s going to present.
I did end up getting to see this because of how it basically blew up once it got the Oscar Best Picture and Best Director nominations.
My small little AMC theatre, which usually only shows mainstream blockbusters and never any international movies, offered this as a $5 fan favorite one Sunday at one time for the first time, and of course I took the time to snatch this. It had already been released on HBO Max at that point, but I wanted to see it on the big screen to force me to pay attention to the big details. And boy, I’m glad I did it. Let’s start this review.
A widowed theatre director finds solace and peace in a quiet driver, who has her own tragic past.
Drive My Car is a road trip and drama, something that screams Ryusuke Hamaguchi. Those who aren’t aware of his work probably wouldn’t know that he has a keen sense for making really long films (one of his movies is literally five hours), but his screenplays and characterization makes the beast of a run time absolutely worth it.
This film does something that I’ve never seen before, though, and that’s the fact that the opening credits don’t drop until after the extended prologue (which is roughly forty minutes) has wrapped up.
Our protagonist is a theatre director and actor, Yusuke, who, at first, has a happy relationship with his screenwriter wife Oto. The cracks in their marriage show when he comes home one day and discovers her cheating with another man, an actor named Takatsuki in one of her dramas.
He acts like nothing has happened, they have a lot of sex, and we see how they lost a daughter a long time ago—she was four years old. Oto dies at the end of the prologue suddenly, as he finds her lying on the floor.
The rest of the movie essentially is Yusuke learning to grieve two years later while putting on a multilingual production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. Lots of really beautiful shots as he’s given a driver to show him around, even though she’s not from there originally. They don’t speak much to each other at first, but as their relationship progresses, we learn more about connection, creativity, and confronting the past through these two characters.
I found the component of the fact that Uncle Vanya is performed in different languages to be very interesting, almost symbolic. It’s like performing a play by yourself as no one around you, without the help of technology, can actually understand what you’re saying.
None of the other actors understood anything outside of their native language and maybe English, yet they managed to create this entire production that seems seamless.
It’s like trying to find transmissions through the static, and then it all becomes clear with that pivotal Sonya scene towards the end. Yusuke has found his peace through the creative process, even if we don’t know how his story ends after this. We do know, however, that his driver for some reason has moved to Korea.
The acting was all really good in this movie, but I will say the standout actors for me were Toko Miura, Masaki Osada, and Park Yu-rim. Everyone in the movie was an excellent actor, but these three truly rose above the best. Miura portrays Watari Misaki, the driver assigned to our beloved theatre director. She doesn’t talk much, but as her backstory begins to be revealed, we slowly get more glimpses into who she really is as a character.
She’s twenty-three, the same age Yusuke’s child would have been if she were still alive, and yet she is so broken because of the abuse then death she faced at such a young age. Miura brings a particular level of nuance to the role because of how little her character says, but then she conveys much more through her eyes, demeanor, and facial expressio.
Masaki Osada is Koji Takatsuki, who cheated with Yusuke’s wife. He was a big hotshot actor who fell from grace originally because he was caught having a relationship with a minor, which essentially destroyed his career.
He went freelance and left his agency, then appears for the auditions because he was keeping an eye on Yusuke’s activities. And he’s a man just as broken as Yusuke; he reveals that he was in love with Oto, Yusuke’s wife, and that he sleeps with girls because it makes him feel like he knows them better.
He also has this monologue at the back of the car, as his eyes spring with tears, about the ending of the story he knew that Yusuke didn’t from Oto. We kind of know that Takatsuki was doomed because of his attitude, and the movie builds it up to the pivotal moment when he has murdered someone and can no longer be in the play.
It’s a disappointing ending for his character, almost unfulfilling, but I get a sense that this is very intentional. Is there hope for Takatsuki? He seems to know himself that he didn’t have much hope. Osada’s performance is incredible, I found him the most intriguing personally.
Park Yu-rim portrays Yoon-a, one of the Hiroshima director’s wife and another actress in the play. What’s interesting about her is that she can hear, but the reason as to why she uses Korean sign language isn’t defined (or I missed it). There’s this brilliant final scene when Yusuke steps in as Vanya and Yoon-a, who is portraying Sonya on stage, is framed so the shot only shows them on stage.
She recites the monologue in KSL, where she tells him that God will see their tears and suffering, just let them be happy. And that scene was the best in the movie, surpassing even the cigarette in the car scene. Absolutely incredible scene and symbolic because Yusuke is clearly affected by the truth of the monologue in comparison to moving on with his own grief.
Overall Thoughts
It’s simply a stunning film, one that you must watch if you’re into stories about what life is actually like. Every single main character is fleshed out well in a way that makes you understand their arc and them, even if Takatsuki is troubled and has a plethora of issues.
Many beautiful shots and framing—I’m glad I saw it in a movie theatre to get the crispness of the scene where they’re in the snow, or the high quality scene when Sonya and Vanya are acting out the scene from the play. All in all, this is not a mainstream movie for everyone, but it teaches you a lot about life.
