Drive My Car: Grace Notes

Drive My Car is based on Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name, from his collection Men Without Women. But it may be more accurate to say that Hamaguchi conjures the atmosphere of the entire collection, which follows men in various stages of searching and anguish without providing readers with easy answers. The script, by Takamasa Oe and Hamaguchi, mostly follows the story of “Drive My Car” but also pulls from “Scheherazade” and “Kino” to create a narrative that’s entirely its own. Other filmmakers have tackled Murakami’s work, but whereas Jun Ichikawa’s Tony Takitani (2004) is more akin to faithful portraiture, and Lee Chang-dong’s Burning (2018) is a near-complete reimagining of the author’s short story “Barn Burning,” Drive My Car is something else entirely, painting impressions of Murakami’s work without remaining beholden to it, excavating the grace inside of his world and allowing its audience to linger in its airy spaces. Speaking about the adaptation, Hamaguchi has noted that capturing Murakami’s feeling was more important than a one-to-one correlation. “My emotional experience,” he told the New York Times, “was something I wanted to convey to viewers of the film as much as possible. That was behind my thinking of the construction of the movie.”

But if to love someone is to know them, Drive My Car also points to the difficulty of this endeavor. With a run time that’s mere seconds under three hours, the film takes the necessary number of beats to drive this point home. In working to see one another clearly, the characters instead walk away with a clearer understanding of themselves. Rather than attempting to define love, Hamaguchi’s film shows us that, by gaining a sense of ourselves, we can find a clearer sense of how and why we love others.

“It is striking that a film that has achieved such extraordinary success is one that emphasizes so thoroughly the unknowability inside us all.”

Hamaguchi has long been a cartographer of matters of the heart, a concern he shares with the filmmakers he says have meant the most to him—including Hou Hsiao-hsien, Jacques Becker, and Roberto Rossellini—and the ones he has called the most personally influential: Yasujiro Ozu, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Mikio Naruse. But as much time as Hamaguchi’s films spend on his characters’ relationships with others, these narratives are just as concerned with their protagonists’ understandings of themselves.

In his sixth fictional feature, Happy Hour (2015), Hamaguchi follows four middle-class women as they interrogate and navigate the changing tides of their relationships. In just over five hours, across the city of Kobe, we follow Akari, Fumi, Sakurako, and Jun in their daily revolutions, punctuated by long silences, conversational lingerings, and seemingly innocuous digressions. Jun has filed for divorce from a husband who’s opposed to the idea, instigating bouts of introspection within her friend group and beyond; their roamings across the film come to shift what they expect from the world, one another, and themselves. In this way, Happy Hour mirrors the meandering of daily life, but we quickly learn that Hamaguchi is playing a long game, trafficking in the power of accumulation, and the film’s payoff is immense.

In Asako I & II (2018), a woman is forced to reckon with memory and reality as she bounces between relationships with a lover and his look-alike. In this film, an adaptation of a Tomoka Shibasaki novel, questions of “acting” and the weight of guilt, and long silences, are mined in a manner that continues blooming in Hamaguchi’s subsequent works. We amble behind Asako (Erika Karata) and Baku (Masahiro Higashide) as they close the distance between initial attraction and familiarity, trust and malaise, and shock and reckoning, contending with the different forms that our truths can take. When Asako commits what is surely one of the most invigorating and appalling relationship transgressions in modern film, we’re left to watch her split-second decision, elation, and reconsideration like ghostly specters, and as she and Ryohei (also played by Higashide) search for a lost cat, en route to the possibility of radical forgiveness, we’re allowed to hope despite all reason. Further anticipating Drive My Car, the film also features a striking sequence of Chekhov’s theater, similarly probing the nature of acting and truth, real and feigned emotion.

In Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (2021), across three different stories, women navigate the rift between their relationships as they perceive them and their realities. And in the Hamaguchi-penned Wife of a Spy (2020)—directed by his mentor, Kiyoshi Kurosawa—a woman suspects that her Japanese husband is operating for the American government, contorting the double-sided coin of obligation and desire across the changing mores of World War II–era Japan.

In all these films, Hamaguchi is invested in exploring the liminal spaces between the faces we put on for ourselves, our loved ones, and the world. He is interested in which of our choices are conscious and challenges the ones that aren’t.

Throughout Drive My Car, there is as much of an obsession with the flexibility of the truth as there is with the precision with which our truths are told. The film’s characters speak Japanese, Mandarin, Tagalog, Indonesian, German, Korean, Korean Sign Language, English, and Malay. They communicate with their entire bodies, and the film gives them room to expand and trusts the viewer to follow along. But all the while, the performers use their acting to both highlight and obscure their true selves: the roles they play in the film’s rehearsals act as both mirror and veil in work and life. As Misaki and Yusuke eat dinner at the home of Lee Yoon-a (a deaf actor) and Kon Yoon-su (one of the theater’s organizers), the power dynamics within the festival—onstage and off—ebb and flow throughout the meal. When Yusuke and Koshi drink in bars tucked away from the confines of rehearsal, the lines between their functions in the play and the space each holds in the other’s life blur. The tension between performing and living is exemplified in Hamaguchi’s own rehearsal structures. He has noted that he has his actors “read the script out loud, as if they are reading a telephone book, in a very flat, devoid-of-emotion style. I have them do it again and again and again, until it becomes mechanical. Until the dialogue really seeps into their bones.” This method, he says, brings subtlety, allowing emotions and reactions to work their way into a performance organically. “And so that makes for a much more nuanced performance—not an overactive performance . . . I think it’s easier for them to react to the motions of the body and the physicality.”

The manner in which Oto’s truth continues to bend over the course of the film, to the tune of her voice in Yusuke’s Saab, is treated like a compass for the narrative. But when Yusuke finally brings Koshi to the precipice of an honest conversation about the affair, during a monologue that shifts the film’s emotional trajectory into nearly overwhelming territory, the young man opts not for confession but for another form of honesty: “The proposition that we can look into another person’s heart with perfect clarity strikes me as a fool’s game. I don’t care how well we think we should understand them, or how much we can love them . . . Examining your own heart, however, is another matter.”

Shortly afterward, as Yusuke and Misaki continue their drive in silence, Misaki notes that Koshi was telling the truth—or rather, the truth for him. She knows this, she adds, because she grew up among liars.

The film is a triumph of translation—and, also, crucially, of silence. And it is striking that a film that has achieved such extraordinary success is one that emphasizes so thoroughly the unknowability inside us all. Drive My Car exists comfortably in Hamaguchi’s oeuvre, while simultaneously expanding his range and intent. And maybe, for me, that’s where the affinities between the film and its source text ring the most resoundingly: the shared understanding that the quest to know the ones we hold dear, and ourselves, can be loping and multitudinous and ruinous but that this makes it no less worth undertaking. Drive My Car feels less like an adaptation than a continuation, without the “necessary” goal of completion, and perhaps it makes sense that the film’s most enduring images are ones of perpetual motion.

It’s fitting, too, that, in a film of silences, we end not with Yusuke’s illumination in repose but with Misaki’s smiling face. The play has ended. Time has passed. Misaki has found herself in Korea, in the midst of our most recent global pandemic. But exiting the grocery store, she enters the film’s Saab with a newfound dog. And removing her face mask, we see that Misaki has finally acknowledged burdens of her own.

It takes courage to call a thing what it is. And it can take even more to carry this truth alongside us. To live a life of attention is an arduous pursuit, and it’s a generosity that Misaki bestows to character upon character throughout the film. What could be a larger gesture than seeing her extend this same grace to herself?

We’re rewarded for our noticing. This is another gift Hamaguchi has given us. And it’s one that we’ll have in tow wherever he takes us next.