With his masterful memory drama “Drive My Car”, the Japanese Ryusuke Hamaguchi has reinvented a Murakami short story.
Those who write about films these days are writing more and more often about the cinema. Hopefully, the sudden attention to what has been a matter of course for generations will not come too late. Many movie theaters are lovingly renovated after the Corona closings, and not only Spider-Man is currently very happy about a visit.
Here is a film that absolutely belongs in these dark rooms, but not because, like a blockbuster, it pushed it towards external greatness. Despite its impressive running time of three hours, “Drive My Car”, this year’s Cannes contribution by the Japanese Ryusuke Hamaguchi, is not an epic either. It is one of those films that make it into the cinema because they themselves have a special feeling for spaces and places. And at the same time need something like a space to think about their full effect.
The central venue is Hiroshima, which at least the European film fan involuntarily calls to mind a classic of auteur films, Alain Resnais’ “Hiroshima, mon amour”. In fact, both films have much more in common than their semi-documentary, symbolic location. In dialogues of literary quality, Hamaguchi also turns the spoken narrative element into an absolute cinematic attraction.
Two years after the death of his wife, the screenwriter Oto, Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a theater maker and actor, is looking for a way back to life and his job. At a festival in Hiroshima he is supposed to stage “Uncle Vanya”. When he arrives, the management imposes the services of a chauffeur on him. Reluctantly, he lets the young Misaki (Toko Miura) drive his neat 80s classic car.
This well-preserved, red Saab 900 Turbo is indeed worth all feelings of protection. Here it becomes the central venue of an urban and yet placeless road movie. On the way there, the Swedish car rolls somewhat enraptured through the Japanese landscape, while the voice of the dead can be heard inside the cassette, a recording of the Chekhov piece. Later Misaki will explain to her passenger that he is in the right place in Hiroshima: “The people here live with their dead”. This also applies to her: she lost her abusive mother in a landslide and lives with the self-reproach of not having saved her.
Where art comes to life
Yusuke uses Oto’s recording to learn a text that he won’t even speak on stage. The piece is played in various Asian languages, including Korean sign language. The rehearsal scenes have a special intimacy and are reminiscent of how the French filmmaker Jacques Rivette used stage situations: as semi-documentary moments in which art comes to life.
The opposite pole of the theater are the stories: Yusuke’s wife had a habit of making up stories after sex, which he should then remember for us. But the legacy he carries in his mind is arguably not complete. Oto had many lovers and Yusuke, although much too young, has now given one of them the role of Vanya.
Hamagushi layered the elements of his weightlessly narrated film like loose sheets of paper on top of one another. This also includes the problematic love story, which opens the film like a wrong track and ultimately returns as a narrative. The literary model for the film, Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name, is just the base of this filigree construction. It is difficult to say how the filmmaker, in his gentle, almost hypnotic directorial style, succeeds in literally dissolving the film time. But in the end it seems as if he made at least one of the three hours disappear by some stage trick.
Weightless does not, of course, mean fleeting; especially the trips with Misaki have a long lasting effect. When Yusuke asks her to drive her to any place in Hiroshima that is quiet, she drives him to an incinerator. Through a pane of glass, they observe the almost tender work of a huge shredding claw: “Doesn’t that look like snow?” She asks her guest. The architect of the industrial complex, it is learned, left space for a pedestrian tunnel in order to respect the historical axis of the city. In general, there are a lot of tunnels in this film, the red Saab seems to prefer to head for them on its metaphysical tours.
At the last Cannes festival, “Drive My Car” was a favorite; he was awarded for the best screenplay; 23 other prizes have since been added. “A fateful encounter” is what the filmmaker called the moment when he came across Murakami’s story. And that is exactly what could result from this visit to the cinema.
Drive My Car. Japan 2021. Regie: Ryusuke Hamaguchi. 179 Min.
