Drive My Car (2021)

What makes Drive My Car exceptional is that it’s entirely modern while remaining completely un-self-conscious. Instead of wringing meaning out of an aesthetic, or leaning on nostalgia, or putting Timothee Chalamet in it, director Ryusuke Hamaguchi is counting on the fact that you, the viewer, are interested in the story in the same way you are interested in anyone’s story, how anyone comes to be who they are.

The self is puzzle enough, but marriage and partnership present the challenge of having to figure out the puzzle of somebody else, and the frustration of never being able to quite get there, never being able to know someone, precisely, with absolute surety, inside-out. When that partnership is cut short by death, as it is with actor Yusuke and his TV executive wife Oto, who dies of a sudden brain hemorrhage, that puzzle becomes unbearable on top of being indecipherable. Haunted by infinite questions you didn’t know to ask, minute actions that could have changed the course of fate, if only you could grasp, if only you had turned the key a different way to figure it out.

Two years after Oto’s death, Yusuke shifts from stage actor playing Uncle Vanya to stage director of Uncle Vanya, employing a specific process for his cast that approximates the inhabiting of skin. Rehearsal consists of repeated readings of the script aloud, for weeks on end, the actors timing their lines like a metronome, in effect memorizing the rhythm of speech, inscribing it into their bodies. When it’s time to go onstage, their words are as natural as breathing.

And I haven’t even gotten to the silent Greek chorus of the long car ride, nor the car’s essential driver, Misaki, whose driving feels like floating through space. She has a rupture of her own to process, silently from the front seat, both she and Yusuke respecting the sanctity of the cab and sinking into the meditative state of the drive, which, in turn, we also can inhabit.

It’s something you want to suck on and savor, all three hours of it. Sexy and sad and contemplative as a long drive in a red car on the coast. Alone with yourself and the inarticulate parts of you that can only unspool and explain themselves in their own time. — Delighter #33