Drive my Car

 Drive my Car (2021) is an excellent Japanese film that advances the questionable proposition that the best cures for melancholy are epic road trips and Chekhov.  Psychotherapy, I suppose might be palliative, but nothing beats 36 hours straight in a car and Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.  The film was directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and is based, although only tangentially, on several stories in Haruki Murakami'sMen without Women, an anthology that intentionally invokes Hemingway's volume of the same name.  Two stories in particular "Drive my Car" and "Scheherazade" seem to have have inspired the three-hour movie, although only in the sense of providing a very basic framework for the plot.  In truth, the movie is most influenced by Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and the first episode in Wong Kar Wei's omnibus film, Chungking Express, a story about a girl in love with a policeman who sneaks into his apartment and leaves little tokens of her affection while, also, cleaning the place.  Hamaguchi's film is brilliantly acted, directed with great aplomb, and sufficiently mysterious, particularly about male-female relationships, to be good fodder for coffee-shop or barroom chat after the picture.  The movie is parsimonious about its distribution of information to the viewer -- key plot points are only established near the end of the 180 minute film; this is effective and not annoying:  the viewer's sense that he or she doesn't know the whole story, even after the last frame, creates intrigue and, even, some mild suspense -- we learn what is happening only after we have seen the event unfold on screen.  A paradigm sequence is illustrative, showing how Hamaguchi works to defer the audience's understanding of a scene, a structural device that animates the whole film:  at a dinner party, the hero, Mr. Kufuku, praises the young woman who has been assigned to drive him about Hiroshima where he is working to direct Chekhov's Uncle Vanya.  The young woman, who is a hard case, is embarrassed and she slips away from the dinner table to do something on the floor.  Her movement is baffling and we wonder what she is doing. No one at the table is surprised, it seems, and this is, also, puzzling.  Then, the camera moves slightly and we see that she is playing with a dog on the floor, the pet of the couple who have invited Mr. Kufuku to dinner.  This is peculiar way of staging the scene but an important effect -- at the end of movie, in the film's enigmatic last couple minutes, we see the young woman chauffeur still driving Kufuku's red Saab 900, leaving a Mega Mart with some groceries; there is a dog in the car with her and, of course, we wonder if this isn't the dog shown at the dinner party.  When Hamaguchi defers revealing information to the viewer, or, even, conceals plot points, these elements of the story are, perhaps, the most important narrative features in the film.

Questions abound in the long preamble to the titles, about 40 minutes by my estimate.  Kufuku is a prominent actor and theater-director.  (We see him performing in Waiting for Godot -- the plays in this picture are presented in a peculiar format by multi-lingual casts, including one woman who uses sign language; titles are projected over the stage.)  Kufuku is married to Oto, a beautiful woman who works as a TV producer.  For some reason, she objects when Kufuku introduces her as his wife.  The couple's marriage has been stressed by the death of their four-year old daughter -- this is presented as a current and devastating source of grief, although later we learn that the couple has been married for 23 years and the little girl dead for 19 years of that period.  When Kufuku is supposed to attend a theater festival in Vladivostock, his flight is delayed for a day and, when he comes home to his apartment, he finds his wife making love to her protegee, a beautiful young man named Koshi who is TV star and celebrity.  Here is where questions multiply:  the scene is staged so that we don't know if Oto is aware that Kufuku is watching the couple and we can't see her male partner, but conclude (correctly I think) that it is the handsome young Koshi.  Kufuku leaves quietly, calls his wife later from the airport and claims that he is in Vladivostock, when in fact he's still in Tokyo.  Oto shows no sign of guilt or remorse and, also, remains very devoted it seems to her husband. Oto has a habit of telling Kufuku stories after they have had sex (this is "Scheherazarade"  element of the plot); Oto can't ever recall the stories that she tells but Kufuku remembers them, writes them down, and Oto, then, adapts them into TV shows.  Oto's story in the first scene in the film involves a teenage girl obsessed with a boy in her school; the girl breaks into the boy's apartment when the family is gone, enters his room, and leaves love-tokens including an unused tampon.  Kufuku gets in a crash with his red car and, in the hospital, learns that he has glaucoma in his left eye and may be losing his vision.  Oto elaborates her story saying that the girl has begun to masturbate in the bedroom of the boy with whom she is obsessed -- perhaps, someone is watching her.  She recalls that in a previous life she was a lamprey attached to a stone in a stream, immobile among moving sea weed.  Kufuku interprets the story as being about him observing Oto having sex with Koshi.  (Late in the film, we learn that Oto's enlargement of the story includes stabbing to death an interloper who was watching the girl masturbate -- she stabs the man, at first, in the left eye with her pen.)  Oto says that she has something important to tell Kufuku.  Kufuki, apparently, thinks that she is going to declare that their marriage is over and, although we learn this only at the end of the movie, drives aimlessly around town, fearful of his wife's announcement to him.  When he returns to their apartment, he finds Oto dead on the floor, the victim of a cerebral hemorrhage.  Then, we see him driving to Hiroshima where he has been hired to direct a multi-lingual production of Uncle Vanya.  Only at this point, does the film provide titles and the names of its actors and producers -- it seems that we have already watched a rather complicated movie and, yet, the film is only beginning.

Very much later, we learn that two years has lapsed since the death of Oto.  In Hiroshima, the managers of the theater festival require that Mr. Kufuku be chauffeured to and from his rehearsals of the Chekhov play.  Kufuku is accustomed to learning his lines while commuting -- Oto, before her death, provided a tape-recorded reading of the play with spaces left for Mr. Kufuku to speak his lines.  This is how he learns his parts.  Kufuku resists someone else driving his beloved, carefully maintained, red Saab 900, perhaps, a symbol for his marriage to Oto. Furthermore, the driver seems a little appalling to him -- a young woman who is very tough cookie indeed.  The next ninety minutes of the movie involve Kufuku casting and directed the Chekhov play -- the lines of Uncle Vanya begin to assume significance as a commentary on the plight of the characters.  Remarkably, Koshi, Oto's lover, has fallen on hard times, apparently accused of having sex with a minor and, more or less, "cancelled" to use current parlance.  Kufuku casts him as Vanya, a surprising decision, since it was expected that the director would play this part himself -- Kufuku seems to be masochistically allowing Koshi to take his place. (Kufuku is impressed with Koshi's audition in which he violently seduces a woman.)  Kufuku casts a mute young actress in the role of Sonya -- the woman acts using Korean sign-language and it's worth noting that she provides one of the greatest performances of that part that I have ever seen.  Koshi declares that he loved Oto.  The play slowly progresses and, then, there's a disaster -- Koshi who is belligerent and aggressive (he's like a young Sean Penn) beats to death a man who has taken his taken his picture with his cell-phone.  Koshi is arrested. The production of the Chekhov play is in doubt.  Mr. Kufuku, uncertain as to what to do, goes on a road-trip.  He has his chauffeur, Misaki, drive him to her village a great distance away in Hokkaido.  Misaki had a difficult relationship with her brutal mother, a night club hostess who died in a land slide -- Misaki, after crawling out of the ruins of the house, didn't call for help and, so, may have left her mother to die in the wreckage.  Misaki and Kufuku survey the ruins of the house, a nest of wreckage in a hilly snow-covered landscape and they exchange confidences.  Misaki, implicitly commenting on the enigmatic structure of the film, says that Kufuku has overthought his relationship with Oto.  Misaki says that Oto desired other men while loving Kufuku and that's all there is to say about her infidelities.  Kufuku and Misaki return to Hiroshima and we see the final moments of Uncle Vanya in which Sonya delivers her famous monologue with her arms protectively wrapped around Kufuku playing Vanya.  There is a little coda that is hard to interpret but that seems optimistic, a sort of muted happy ending.  

The movie is similar to some of Rivette's pictures in that it primarily involves the production of a play that provides parallels and commentary to the relationships between the characters.  Rivette explored this theme in Va Savoir and L'amour fou.  The interplay between the Chekhov text and the film's action is very intricate and compelling -- there is plenty of food for thought in teasing out the relationships between the company of actors and the text they are rehearsing.  Further, the movie is visually compelling -- the climactic road-trip is physically exhausting to the viewers as well as to the characters; when Misuki gets out of the car, she staggers with that ataxic gait that people show who have been driving for too many hours.  The trip to Hokkaido is literally into the center of the earth, involving long, formidable tunnels cut through mountains.  The picture has a host of minor characters who are all brilliantly delineated and memorable.  Hamaguchi is a cinephile and the picture echoes innumerable other films, including It Happened One Night, a primordial road movie, and several of Wim Wenders' pictures including Paris, Texas and Alice in the Cities.  There are clever montages, fascinating sequences involving play rehearsal, and dramatic dialogues that are daringly extended across many minutes.  The film is a bit repetitive in its long central sequence involving production of the Chekhov play and I'm a little skeptical about narratives that follow the model of Tennessee Williams' plays, that is, each character reveals in turn a secret sorrow -- but Drive my Car does this just about as well as it can be done and I recommend the film highly.