“Drive My Car,” Reviewed: A Murakami Adaptation About Sex, Lies, and Art

When credits are placed unconventionally in movies, it’s usually a matter of flashy style, but in Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s new film, “Drive My Car,” opening on Wednesday, it’s a matter of dramatic substance. The credits don’t turn up until about forty minutes into the movie, which runs a minute shy of three hours; they mark the border between prelude and action. It’s a long setup, and it might have been exasperating if not for Hamaguchi’s suave sense of melancholic style, marked by a luminous yet cold fluidity, like a limpid stream of water that stings.

“Drive My Car,” based on a story by Haruki Murakami, is a movie about artists and their many forms of collaboration—cursed and blessed, inescapable and ill-chosen, behind the scenes and on public display, affably professional and ineffably intimate. It’s one of the great movies about the continuity of art and life, about the back-and-forth flow between personal relationships and artistic achievements—and about the artifices and agonized secrets on which both depend. The story begins with a fortysomething married couple at home in Tokyo, a TV screenwriter named Oto (Reika Kirishima) and her husband, Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), an actor and stage director. Oto has a peculiar creative process: she tells stories while she and Yusuke have sex, and the next morning Yusuke recites them back to her. She then fleshes the stories out, but if she’s stuck on a detail she leaves it to be completed in another sexual brainstorm. Whatever works. In any case, a complication arises when Yusuke, returning home unexpectedly one day, finds her in bed with another man. (He sneaks out silently without interrupting the lovers.) Then, on the very day that Oto is preparing Yusuke for a serious talk about their relationship, she dies, suddenly, of a cerebral hemorrhage. Two years later, he’s invited to direct a production of “Uncle Vanya,” the play he was starring in when she died, at an arts festival in Hiroshima. The credits feature Yusuke at the wheel of his beloved car, driving from Tokyo to Hiroshima, to begin the project that makes up the core of the movie’s action.

There’s something about the car, a red Saab 900, that stands out: its steering wheel is on the left—which is unusual in Japan because driving there is done on the left side of the road. Not only is Yusuke deeply attached to his car, for unspecified and ostensibly sentimental reasons; he’s deeply attached to driving it, because doing so is an essential part of his own artistic process. When he was preparing to star in “Uncle Vanya” before Oto’s death, she recorded for him the entire play minus his character’s lines on a cassette tape so that he could practice delivering them as he drove. But, when Yusuke arrives in Hiroshima, the festival organizers tell him that, for insurance reasons, he can’t do his own driving; they’ve hired a driver for him, a young woman from a troubled background named Misaki (Tôko Miura), and she’ll be chauffeuring him between the theatre and his hotel. He’s displeased—he had picked a hotel an hour away, to preserve his time for rehearsing with the tape—but he has no choice. As a result, he has to change his method, working with the tape in Misaki’s company and, inevitably, developing a personal relationship with her—which, of course, ultimately inflects his art as well as his life.

Yusuke’s audacious methods become apparent from the first day of auditions. Working with a company manager named Yuhara (Satoko Abe) and a Korean dramaturge named Yoon-su (Dae-young Jin), he brings Japanese actors together with those from many other Asian countries—Taiwan, the Philippines, South Korea—all of whom perform in their first language. A Korean actress named Yoon-a (Yoo-rim Park), who is mute, plays her role in Korean Sign Language. Moreover, Yusuke’s direction of them begins with sitting around a table and merely running the lines inexpressively. (This is a method the French call rehearsing “à l’italienne,” and which the great French director Jean Vilar defined as “the body at rest and the ass in the chair.”) The cast chafes at this process, but, as Yusuke makes clear, he’s not at all concerned with the actors’ pleasure in their work. When one woman tells him that they’ll “do better” if he explains his interpretation of the script, he responds, “You don’t have to do better. Just read the text.”

Text is one of Hamaguchi’s obsessions, and the core of his art. In his best films—such as his five-hour masterwork, “Happy Hour”—he gives language a seemingly visible, physical presence. In “Drive My Car,” the text of Chekhov’s play (both recited by Oto and performed by the cast in rehearsals) forms a kind of running commentary and internal monologue. Sometimes, it’s used with a wry irony, as when the line “If you only knew how miserable I am!” corresponds to Yusuke’s discovery of Oto’s infidelity, or when “You are my most bitter enemy” matches up with the imposed presence of Misaki in his car. Other times, the effect is far more intimate, as when, at a critical moment in his relations with the cast, Yusuke hears Oto’s recording of the lines “Will you tell me the whole truth? . . . More frightening is not knowing it.” The very questions of truth and self-deception are what keep Yusuke from playing the titular role in the Hiroshima production himself. As he explains to the actor whom he has cast in the role, “When you say his lines, it drags out the real you. Don’t you feel it?” He adds, “I can’t bear that anymore.”

The reason for his guarded vulnerability emerges in the course of the film. “Drive My Car” is, first and foremost, an overwhelmingly powerful tale of guilt and confession. In extraordinarily self-revealing monologues delivered during his car rides with Misaki, or in the company of his cast and crew, Yusuke describes the tense, fragile bond that existed between him and Oto. His colleagues similarly unburden themselves to him with tales of personal failings, betrayals and deceptions, and piercingly discerning observations and accusations. (Misaki, whose work as a driver turns out to be a sort of painfully won calling, is as vitally confessional and observant as the artists.) Hamaguchi turns the film’s searing monologues into moments of cinematic power. The characters’ words ring out grandly to fill, even to transform, the luminously filmed settings—the cityscapes and the vast rural vistas—in which they’re delivered. These scenes, which come late in the action, are both elaborately long and dramatically climactic: thrillingly intense payoffs for the carefully built fabrications that underpin them.

Once they’re voiced, these stories seem to flow immediately back into the production of “Uncle Vanya,” which deepens, layer by layer, as its participants—including, in her way, Misaki—bare their souls to one another. One of those colleagues plays a special, sensitive role in the proceedings: a young actor named Takatsuki (Masaki Okada) whom, to his surprise and that of the entire company, Yusuke casts in the role of Uncle Vanya. Avoiding spoilers, I’ll say that “Drive My Car” turns out to be perhaps the most potent film I’ve ever seen on the subject of a so-called cancelled man. Takatsuki, a former star of TV and movies, is out of work following an accusation of sexual relations with a minor. (He claims that he was “framed.”) Yusuke hires Takatsuki nonetheless, telling him that his lack of self-control is “socially bad” but that it’s “not bad for an actor.” In the course of the rehearsals, Takatsuki soon commits a serious crime, and Hamaguchi’s anguished point is clear: by truncating Takatsuki’s needed period of reflection, repentance, and self-improvement, Yusuke is guilty of gross irresponsibility, even complicity in the crime. After Takatsuki’s arrest, Yusuke must rescue the production by overcoming his hesitation and stepping into the role of Uncle Vanya at the last minute—and his performance and his production is darkly shadowed by his guilt.

The concluding sequence, set on the play’s opening night—in which the text is rendered, in all of its written languages, on a huge screen above and behind the actors—is one of the great movie scenes of theatrical performance. It’s dominated not by Yusuke but by Yoon-a, who, in sign language, renders the words of the play all the more powerful through the eloquence of her gestures, the grace of her presence, and the monumentality of silence. Yet this sublime, redemptive ending nonetheless rings somewhat hollow. Hamaguchi’s exaltation of art and its inextricable source in guilt leaves his characters and his spectators hanging; the charge that he plants in the first act never goes off, and he fails to fully dramatize the implications of his own observations—namely, the very nature of the guilt in question, the gap between the seemingly existential kind arising from Yusuke’s relentless self-scrutiny and his manifestly practical moral irresponsibility, and the question of whether Yusuke himself recognizes it. In that sense, “Drive My Car” is an exemplary case of formal artifice and cathartic emotion getting in the way, and leaving even one of the most discerning and thoughtful of filmmakers behind the wall of a classicism of silent and noncommittal ambiguity that the best modern films have broken through.