At a time when our connections with others are often mediated by algorithms and screens, taking a long ride in an automobile can feel like one of the few spaces left where we can share an honest, open moment with someone else. This has often been true in the movies, as cops bond during stake-outs and road-tripping passengers spill secrets; where everything from a Jeep-bound conversation in a Kiarostami film to a high-speed Fast and the Furious bro-down takes on unexpected emotional grace.
In writer-filmmaker Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's newly Oscar-nominated Drive My Car, a cherry-red 1987 Saab 900 Turbo is the latest, somewhat unlikely vessel for shared intimacy, gliding through the three-hour emotional epic.
- Read: the full list of nominations for the 94th Academy Awards
Loosely adapted from a 2014 short story by Haruki Murakami, Hamaguchi's melodrama focuses on renowned Tokyo theatre director Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a melancholy 40-something whose screenwriter wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) is having an affair with her doll-faced TV star (Masaki Okada).
Hamaguchi's precise filmmaking here is so seemingly nonchalant that his title credits don't unroll until some 40 minutes in, by which time the story has jumped ahead two years and a tragedy. We pick up with a grief-wracked Yūsuke, who has accepted a two-month artist's residency at a theatre festival in Hiroshima, where he is to stage a production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya with an international troupe.
Yūsuke arrives in Hiroshima behind the wheel of his faithful Saab, a now-vintage ride that he's cared for with the level of affection normally reserved for an old friend, on whose tape deck he listens to recordings of his wife reading the lines of his plays.
So he's a little rattled when a driver is assigned to chauffeur him to and from the institution each day — in his own car. She's Misaki Watari (Tôko Miura), an aloof, 23-year-old Hokkaido runaway in Chuck Taylors, who puffs on cigarettes like a young beatnik – or Winona Ryder's tomboy cabbie in Night on Earth – but whose insouciance belies a wisdom beyond her years.
Yūsuke's begrudging acceptance of Misaki's skilled driving is sealed when he breaks a long silence to ask: "Could you play the cassette tape?"
The film moves effortlessly between affecting close-ups, patient long takes and lyrical images, such as the pair's cigarettes held aloft in the car's sunroof, tips glowing in the night sky – all shot cleanly by cinematographer Hidetoshi Shinomiya with an unfussiness that conceals his elegant command.
As the car winds the roads of the island, skirting lush forest and the edge of the Setouchi Sea, the unusual pair are slow to exchange words. She simply drops him off to rehearsals each morning; waits; then drives him home each night, while Yūsuke gazes numbly out the window, his eyes betraying a deeply repressed well of sadness.
Often, the car is filled with the sound of Chekhov's words on endless loop, Oto's voice a haunting reminder of Yūsuke's fraught marriage and his unspoken existential crisis, as well as the encroaching deadline of the theatre production.
"Don't you get sick of hearing this?" he asks Misaki when the tape starts once again, a question that could drolly be extended to the audience.
But words, and their delivery, are what electrify Drive My Car, and the lines of Chekhov's play shift and transform with each new iteration.
"The text is questioning you," Yūsuke says to one of his actors, in full thrall to its diabolical powers.
The ineffable magic of performance is a cinematic well that's long been tapped by filmmakers such as Jacques Rivette. As clear-cut notions of reality collapse, life and art enchantingly blur.
Here, Misaki might be seen as a version of Chekhov's Sonya, a world-weary innocent who resists self-pity, and who slowly guides Yūsuke, a stand-in for the despairing Vanya, to accept the trials of life and find something like peace.
That this all plays out against the backdrop of atomic-bombed Hiroshima, a city synonymous with a suffering that can never be forgotten, subtly amplifies the emotional pitch.
This blurring seems to be a private obsession of Hamaguchi's. His characters are always engaged in some form of ambiguous role-play; in his breakthrough ensemble piece Happy Hour (2015), the doppelganger drama Asako I & II (2018) and his phenomenal 2021 triptych Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (due in cinemas in March), deception and mistaken identities abound.
Drive My Car is a less experimental, more classically emotional and outwardly "major" offering than those films. It's also — not coincidentally — the first of Hamaguchi's movies to find significant favour outside the festival circuit, having already collected a trunk-full of awards (including three at the Cannes Film Festival) en route to its multiple Oscar nods.
Like so many professional loners, Yūsuke and Misaki are drawn to each other through a kind of quiet, mutual respect – highly skilled craftspeople who cling to their work to get through each day.
But their rapport evolves into something deeper as the back-seat chatter increases, especially after Misaki drives him to one of her favourite spots on the island, a hulking waste treatment facility where she stops to admire the falling scraps of garbage: "Isn't it kind of like snow?"
It's in these rare moments that Yūsuke and Misaki are each able to find a sympathetic ear and open up about their own painful pasts
The film majestically balances icy restraint with pure blasts of emotion, burrowing right down into the characters' souls.
Like much of Hamaguchi's work, Drive My Car profoundly understands the fickleness of fate, of lives marked by freak accidents and chance connections. No amount of real talk can bring Yūsuke's loved ones back, but – to paraphrase Lennon and McCartney's urtext – he's found a driver, and that's a start.
Drive My Car is in cinemas now.
