Film Review: Drive My Car

Drive My Car

Peter Bond

Late in Uncle Vanya, you hear “The truth, whatever it is, is not as frightening as uncertainty.”

I do not like sitting in uncertainty, it is far more difficult than sitting in truth. The blur, the mess, the way some things just are, defies me. Some things are beyond our judgment and understanding, and we are forced to sit without knowing. Sit in the silence, and find peace.

Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s recent Haruki Murakami adaptation, has been drawing attention overseas,

and some late season awards buzz. The director previously worked on the sprawling Happy Hour, Asako I & II , and last year’s Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy. Here he takes on the work of one of Japan’s most famous modern writers.

The dreamy interiority of Murakami’s writing is grafted on screen here as we follow a grieving theater director tackling an adaptation of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. When he arrives, he is mandated to have a driver chauffeur him. At first, he declines, but he relents and the young woman Misaki takes the driver’s seat while he is left in the back. Women throughout Murakami’s stories can appear as flat dreamy mysteries, but here they are given life but held at a distance at the same time. In the back seat, Yuusuke grapples with the memory of his wife and his adaptation of Uncle Vanya. He’s stoic, yet seething with a clenched fury. Grief, with anger flashing through it. We cannot have grief without love, and Yuusuke’s love for his wife burns bright. We see them early on, and he is enthralled with her. Yet, they are parts of her he cannot come to face. Parts of his wife that are flattened, ignored, excused. Is he seeing what he only wants to see in her? What do we do when we are shown what we don’t want to see? This question hangs over his grief as he contemplates who his wife was, and what that means for the love they had.

In the source material, Murakami frames it as “Can any of us ever perfectly understand another person? However much we may love them?” This is the aching question that sits at the heart of the movie. How does our love intersect with uncertainty? Misaki prods Yuusuke, not verbally but by her own memories. Speaking of her past and a loss in her life. Together they start to find some idea of how to move on together. To sit with grief, to remember the ones we love, and sit in the silent unknowing and find peace.

One of the more remarkable sections of this movie is it’s use of Korean Sign Language throughout and in the production of Uncle Vanya. The scenes of Uncle Vanya performed

resonate, and the characters speak of them almost as Sutras. A type of emotional knowledge and truth that transcend language, and are communicated purely by the character’s will and self-knowledge. The truths of great art transcend language, both for Chekov and for this adaptation.

Drive My Car has been rereleased nationwide in preparation for the Academy Awards in the United States.

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