Drive My Car

Directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi. 2021

How to bring something back to life?

Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi worries at this question in Drive My Car, the story of a widowed theatre maker, Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), and the two relationships he enters in the years after the death of his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima). First he is commissioned to make a version of Uncle Vanya for a festival in Hiroshima and is provided a driver by the organisers: Misaki (Tôko Miura) is reticent and steely. Coolly pugnacious. Determined and skilful. And then in that production Yûsuke casts a young actor named Kôji (Masaki Okada). Tall and charismatic, Koji carries a restless energy. Slightly wild. Dangerous. He is someone Yûsuke has known before as well, being one of the many men his wife was fucking.

So what is dead and needs reviving? In one sense the answer is simple: Oto has died suddenly of a brain haemorrhage and Yûsuke’s life is decimated. He stops acting and moves like a ghost, and the film follows as in different ways Misaki and Kôji offer him routes out of himself again, and back into the world. At the close we see him giving his Vanya and know he is recovering. So that structure is there, and probably does a lot to hold us in this quiet film that makes few concessions elsewhere. But Hamaguchi invites thought about what else might be dead; and one of the things I think the film suggests is connection. No one can truly know each other in this world. Relationships are defined by deep misunderstandings that cut like cracking fissures, building an atmosphere heavy with pain – characters lonely and in supressed turmoil. Crucially genuine connection does exist and is felt in brief scraps, but happens almost by accident at the edges of other experience: buried in the subtext of something polite or professional; couched in theatrical performance. Yamaguchi’s landscape is yearning. It aches for human-to-human understanding.

In the film’s first act – which plays as a gorgeous extended prologue, 40 minutes of exquisite story before the title cards – Yûsuke discovers Oto and Koji having sex in his apartment. Alarm turns to devastation on his face as he first hears and then sees them. We imagine the confrontation to come, and the drawn-out dissolution of their marriage. But then he leaves without making himself known, and in the days that follow and until Oto’s death, sits on the information never expressing or even trying to express the emotions we saw in him. It feels sore. Bleak. But at the same time the couple manage to keep going, maintained by shreds of understanding that remind them closeness is possible. We see them in the dim afterglow of sex when Oto is inspired to tell elliptical stories she’s doomed to forget by morning, when Yûsuke will feed them back to her. So there we do see give and take – something like a conversation. And this odd dialogue continues even after Oto’s death. Early on she recorded herself playing all the parts in Vanya so Yûsuke can recite his lines, and he listens to those cassettes in the car each day – receiving the same cues, interjecting in the same spaces – and while the spoken language never changes there is a sort of reckoning going on underneath.

With Misaki and Koji, the pattern repeats. When Misaki drives them to and from rehearsal each day, she and Yûsuke reach understanding in tiny moments – about whether Yûsuke wants his cassettes played, or the resilience of his old car. The fringe time they spend together, at the peripheries of each day, somehow opens up a space for unselfconsciousness. Observation without judgment. Trust. And it’s only when Koji, with whom Yûsuke clashes during rehearsals, bums a lift home in the car one night, that he can honestly speak about his relationship with Oto – the yellow lamps of the motorway crossing his face, set free from all the pretending he’d been doing in the daylight.

As a theatre-maker Yûsuke is known for experimental multilingual revivals of classic plays. The actors in a production might come from across Asia and speak different languages: Japanese, Korean, Mandarin, Cantonese, and the show would use surtitles so the audience know what’s going on – the actors don’t though. It’s possible that playing opposite someone in a scene, they have no idea what’s being said. Their challenge is to read the meaning in the other person’s eyes. The clench of a fist. The shuffling of nervous feet under a table. It’s so apposite because without knowing it, Yûsuke has been doing that throughout the story. With Oto in bed and on those tapes, with Misaki and Koji in the car, and the result for him is a clarity that shifts the dark clouds formed after Oto’s death. Her infidelity was so incongruent with the life he knew, but here he comes to understand that while she was unfaithful, she loved him as well. That the two truths can coexist. That those transgressions were an equal part of what made her. For us as viewers, the revelation offers a notion: when connection has been burnt out, the possibility remains that by nursing the embers it could flare up again.

In Yûsuke’s Uncle Vanya the actor playing Sonya uses Korean Sign Language (KSL). At the end of the film we see her and Yûsuke on stage, she with arms hung loosely around his neck as he sits, hands moving swiftly.

We’ll patiently endure the trials that fate sends our way.
Even if we can’t rest,
we’ll continue to work for others
both now and when we have grown old

Lee Yoon-A (Yoo-Rim Park) is a dancer that turned to acting after a miscarriage severed something of the connection between her self and body. When she auditioned the festival dramaturg, Kon Yoon-Su (Dae-Young Jin), translated for her and only after she was cast revealed that they are in fact husband and wife. They have Yûsuke and Misaki over for a meal to apologise for the deception. Bashful faces. Beer and Coke. A table of delicious looking dishes. Yoon-A signs that the potatoes look like her husband – they laugh. At one point Yoon-Su gets on to the story of their meeting. He loved her almost at first sight and wanted to know her language – so he decided to learn it. We’re left to imagine the hours of practise that took. The time spent rewiring his brain. When Yoon-A’s Sonya tells Yûsuke’s Vanya in that final scene, to remember to work for others in his life, she both describes Yoon-Su’s act of love for her, and forces her audience into the same project. Unless we’re fluent in KSL, we all lean forward in our seats and begin the listening game of making connections between that which we don’t understand and that which we do. Shapes drawn by fingers and the text filing onto the bottom of the screen. Hamaguchi reminds us that this is an activity by cutting only to the rapt faces of the festival crowd. The moment – the characters – the film is a profound article of faith in listening. It argues that only by listening can we hear or understand. And that though we might not do it well, or very often, we can if we decide to try.