in the red
by Douglas Messerli
Ryūsuke Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe (screenplay, based on a
fiction by Haruki Murakami), Ryūsuke Hamaguchi
(director) ドライブ・マイ・カー (Doraibu
mai kā) (Drive My Car)
/ 2021, US 2022
Japanese director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi’s 2021 film Drive My Car hearkens back in its tone and structure to the arthouse films of the 1960s by such masterful filmmakers as Ingmar Bergman andMichelangelo Antonioni. Like their works, Hamaguchi’s film is a psychological exploration of various human beings that provides no easy answers for what you discover about them. All you can truly know is that like the characters in the play which is at the center of this work, Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya, they are suffering in inexplicable ways that no one can easily resolve. Failed love, loss, guilt, a sense of purposelessness, and simple fear of the chaos that life embraces faces many of the film’s figures in a way that is not only fully unknowable, but irresolvable. Like Vanya and Sonya, they find little real joy in their lives, but need one another just to hang on until their promised deaths, when everything will be resolved—if you believe, that is, in that vision of a rather Christian afterlife.
But lest you should imagine that you can
take Vanya and link up matching characters to help explain the film’s fictional
figures, I should explain that Hamaguchi, although employing much of Bergman’s
psychological approaches to cinema, invokes little of his symbolism, but rather
weaves a pattern of certain voices of Chekov’s play and even Beckett’s Waiting
for Godot (referenced early in the film) and uses them as reverberations to
help explicate the emotions and actions of his characters—in particular Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), Kōji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), Oto Kafuku (Reika
Kirishima), and Misaki Watari (Tōko Miura)—while letting them roam through a
landscape of places and incidents that, at times, seem as inscrutable as those
of Antonioni’s films.
Fortunately, this is not a drama that
you can solve like a riddle or simply reveal its truths through structural
connections. Although Yūsuke attempts to live in a world of simple repetition,
sounding out his stage reality as a guide to life, the true nature of the world
in which he lives, he soon discovers, is in constant flux, with no boundaries
in which to contain the sorrow and confusion he suffers.
Superficially, Yūsuke’s
problems seem to have been generated through a rather simple series of events.
Married for several years to Oto, with whom he was deeply in love and she,
apparently, with him, their relationship altered with the death of their child
at an early age of pneumonia, after which, he later explains, everything
changed. Having been working in television, he moved on to begin acting in and
directing theater, while Oto began to write television scripts, many of them
quite strangely composed during and after their sexual orgasms. As he describes
it, and we observe, immediately after sex and even during it she would go into
a kind of trance describing long narratives to him which, when he quotes them
back later in the day or the next morning, sometimes revising and interpreting
them as he retells the events, would become the substance of her acclaimed TV
dramas.
One of these in development, upon which
the film focuses, involves a young girl in love with a teenage boy, but fearful
of being rejected who keeps her love to herself, breaking into his house during
the day while his parents are working and he is away at school or playing
soccer. In his room, she senses his presence as if almost under water—indeed
she imagines herself at one point as having lived a previous life as a lamprey
who refused to leech onto another fish but held fast to a rock to simply flow
with the water until she died—each day leaving a hidden treat for her would-be
lover, a pencil, an unopened tampon, a pair of silk underpants, hidden away in
places in which he might never find them. This continues for several visits
until one day she finally allows herself to masturbate in his bed dropping
tears as she does so—her gift for the day—upon his pillow. But suddenly she
hears the front door being opened, someone coming up the stairs....but there,
for her husband Yūsuke, the story ends.
During the period when we overhear these
narratives, Yūsuke must travel on theater business, but finding his flight
cancelled due to weather he returns home to find her having sex with a young
man. He enters so quietly that they do not notice him, and he turns and leaves
without them ever knowing that he has been there. But evidently, we later
discover, her sexual indiscretions have occurred several times over the years.
And Yūsuke says nothing in fear of losing the relationship that remans. Yet
clearly he is troubled, and when returning from the trip, he has an accident in
his beloved car (a red Saab 900 convertible—the color was yellow in Murakami’s
original story, proving, in part, that the color is not symbolic). He is unhurt
and the car is repaired to look as if new, but through a medical checkup after
the crash he discovers that he is developing severe glaucoma in one eye, and
will eventually lose his vision.
Soon after this incident, upon telling the last part of her story which
I described above, Oto asks if they might have a serious discussion that
evening. Fearful, apparently, that she may either confess her sexual cheating
or put an end to their tenuous relationship, he drives for long hours after
work, arriving home late to discover his wife dead on the floor from a brain
hemorrhage.
Soon after, while performing the role of Vanya—which he has been
rehearsing through a car casette recorded by his wife throughout some of these
Hamaguchi makes clear that the series of events I have just recited are
simply a 40-minute preface to the far more lugubriously told “real” story of
the film, which takes place two years later.
Much of the rest of the film is spent in a Hiroshima theater retreat to
where Yūsuke has been invited to cast and rehearse a performance of Uncle
Vanya. And since Yūsuke’s directorial methods involve casting plays with
actors who perform in different languages and, in this case, even sign
language, he rehearses plays primarily by having the cast endlessly repeat
without major inflection the lines of the play so that they might eventually
know them so well, even if not always understanding the precise words, that
they simply begin to “feel” one another and act—when he finally allows his cast
members to stand and move—with another as if their interchange was something
internally felt, almost like a dance.
Since the viewer is privy to many segments of these rehearsals, we too
come to know Chekhov’s play not by its plot but through certain refrains of his
language, through the subtle inflections of words that create a kind of reality
that might almost be described, with the title of a Bergman work, as “through a
glass darkly,” not entirely comprehending what the words precisely mean in
their sentences, but knowing what they mean on an emotional level.
It is indeed a brave film that asks us,
as the audience, to participate in the actor’s theatrical methodology which, in
turn, relates to the way events begin in occur in the movie itself. But then
this is not one’s everyday movie.
First of all, the group that has come
together to audition for his project are not made up of the typical cast
members. For example, the young man with whom Yūsuke’s
wife Oto was having an affair, Kōji Takatsuki, shows up, having left his
starring roles in Oto’s popular filmscripts—the TV company has apparently
dismissed him because of unruly behavior—now wanting to be cast as Astrov in
the Chekhov play. Oddly, Yūsuke casts him as Vanya,
the role everyone had expected him to perform, a role for which Kōji is far too
young, as he himself insists, while Yūsuke dismisses his concerns by suggesting
that he can be made to look older through makeup and costumes.
Together these five figures, Yūsuke, Kōji, Yoo-na, the dramaturge, and Misaki, become the focus on the rest of the film’s tale, each of them moving in and out of the others’ real lives just as they do, among the other actors, on the stage.
Yoo-na and the dramaturge, we soon discover, are actually married which
explains his ability to interpret Korean sign-language; but on the occasion of
their invitation of Yūsuke and his driver Misaki to
dinner we hear of their deep love for one another, of Yoo-na’s former life as a
dancer, and her strength to survive in a culture in which she cannot read the
language and has no one other than her husband with whom she can communicate.
Yet the two, with their dog, seem to be the healthiest and happiest figures in
the film, peaceful in their silences and able to negotiate worlds that others
find impossible to penetrate.
At that dinner Yūsuke also, for the
first time, opens up about his admiration for Misaki’s driving skills, her
ability to drive over the roughest roads, change lanes, and shift speeds with a
smoothness that makes him feel he is almost floating. His confession to the
couple in front of the girl forms a link between the two, where before only
tension seemed to exist. We also discover that the quiet and brooding Misaki
loves dogs as she quickly moves to the floor to pet the couple’s beautiful dog.
Tension, obviously, also exists between Yūsuke
and Kōji. In this case we know that part of their
interchange exists within the context of Yūsuke knowing
that young actor was Oto’s lover, without Kōji realizing that he knows it. Yet
the younger man senses the danger, inviting the director out for drinks to try
to break down the distance that Yūsuke has put between himself and all others.
But Kōji is also something of a hothead, and sensitive, in particular, about
people snapping his picture, perhaps because he has been rebuked by the very
media that has made him famous and can’t bear to be reminded of it by his
secretive fans. When he threatens one such photographer in the hotel bar, Yūsuke
leaves quickly, breaking any possible communication the boy may have been
seeking.
At another point, frustrated with his responsibilities,
Yūsuke asks Misaki to show him around Hiroshima. She
gladly does so, but takes him to rather odd spots, particularly the
revolutionary garbage center, where in glass-encased buildings we watch a giant
mechanized craw grab up mounds of garbage and deposit them gently in a huge bin
where it is ecologically burned. She also tells him a little of her own
history, how she escaped her unpleasant home life by driving until she reached
Hiroshima where her vehicle broke down, forcing her to find work driving a
garbage truck, eventually being hired into her current job. The tour of the
infamous drop of the first nuclear bomb adds further significance to the
hotspot it has become in this film for these two individuals and the others
involved.
In an attempt to both apologize and
further explain why he has shown up to perform in such an outpost, Kōji asks for another meeting, and at yet another bar
attempts to explain how he comprehends what the director is asking from his
performance while confessing his difficulty in achieving it since they have
been so influenced by the same woman, and destroyed by her death. He admits
that he feels empty within. This time he admits that their coming together was,
in fact, almost inevitable; and the relationship between the two of them seems
to deepen a bit, Yūsuke even offering to have Misaki drop him off at his hotel
on the way home to the island where the director has been living. Outside the
bar, where during their conversation a young man has been secretively
photographing the young actor, Kōji disappears for a moment following
the photographer back into the bar before he joins Yūsuke for the voyage home.
As critic Carlos Aguilar perceives, from the beginning the car itself
appears to open up people to expression:
“Burning bright red through the
streets and highways, the artist’s car is a temple of freedom and solitude, the
embodiment of the return and the departure, the way back home to his beloved
and the escape from the fallout of their present. It’s in the silence of that
moving space that Oto’s voice comes through the speakers via the aforementioned
tape feeding him lines, a lifeline. What she recites might come from the
classic text or perhaps directly from her, but the distinction doesn’t matter.
Both become one and the same in a continuum.”
And suddenly within these hallowed
confines, the young Kōji opens up to Yūsuke, beginning to relate the story we have already
heard, just as Yūsuke has lived through its creation, about the young girl who
breaks into her loved one’s house and bedroom. Yūsuke quickly interrupts him,
repeating the narrative up until where it has apparently ended.
But Kōji is able to take the previous tale beyond that point, revealing
that the unknown person that had arrived in the house was a burglar who, when
she was about to accosted, the young naked girl killed by stabbing him over and
over with a pen, leaving his body in the house as new inescapable gift, and
expecting the next day to face the police.
Nothing happens. The soccer-playing boy seems unchanged and goes about
his business for several days after the event. Curious about his and his
family’s response, she wanders near the house and notices that although
everything seems the same, the owners have now put up a surveillance camera.
Everything looks as if nothing had changed, but everything is quietly very
different. When she checks for the key previously left under an outdoor plant,
it is no longer there. And eventually, realizing that her world has also
changed she goes face to face with the camera repeating slowly and clearly in
order to be understood, that she has committed the murder, confessing the
horribly absurd crime.
The story, as retold, opens up several
new possibilities. If Yūsuke has been all along the boy to whom she couldn’t
fully reveal her love, to who she has simply left signs of her feelings, is he
now the burglar come to claim a love that she cannot fully explain or provide?
And if so, has she imagined his death, confessing it, just prior to her own?
There are no answers, of course, only a few clues, the few signs she left, her
tears perhaps and, without even knowing it, the body (her own?) being the most
important of her tributes of her love. This all despite her inability to openly
express it to him, seeking temporary love perhaps in others. But as I said this
film does not function like a Rubrik’s cube; it is not a coded film with
answers for those in the know.
Kōji suddenly
seems older, as old as the 47-year-old Vanya, able to advise Yūsuke that Oto was a very special person who one could
never quite know from the outside, someone deeply in love with her husband.
Without admitting his role in her life, Kōji has forced Yūsuke to at least to
confront the fact that the loved one, the other, can never be fully
comprehended.
Strangely, after they drop off Kōji,
Misaki speaks up for what she believes is the boy’s veracity, admitting that
she lived in a world where everyone lied and therefore can easily see
mendacity, while she now believes that Kōji is
telling the truth.
Shortly after this, we observe the boy brilliantly performing Vanya in
final rehearsals. But at
Once more we observe in this single
scene how this play reverberates with other scenes and events, in this
instance, another “breakdown” in the play, a near-death (which becomes a real
death), and a surveillance camera all call up instances still fresh in our
minds.
The major figure of the play having
been arrested, everyone, Yūsuke in particular, is in
shock, the center’s director reminding him that if he does not now play Vanya,
they shall have to cancel the performance.
Still Yūsuke refuses, returning to his
hotel room to contemplate the situation, one he knows will end in another
emotional breakdown, this one perhaps even worse, particularly knowing what he
now knows about Oto and Kōji.
En route, he explains to his driver why he cannot perform, arguing
that he was the one who actually killed his wife by not returning home
immediately to hear the issues she wanted to discuss. His cowardice, he is
convinced, made her death certain; had he returned earlier he might have saved
her, called for the ambulance before it was too late.
Seeing his tears and pain, Misaki reaches out to comfort him. Previously
she has told him that her mother, herself an actress, died in a landslide that
tore apart their house. But she now tells him the full story, that she herself
was also in the house and gradually found a way out, yet refused to return or
call for others to save her mother. She hated her mother for all the beatings
she had suffered and couldn’t act; yet, she admits, she also loved her. Just as
painfully as Yūsuke’s confession, hers is expressed from the deepest of
suffering and a sense of guilt.
Yūsuke
answers that if he were her father—reminding himself aloud that if his daughter
had lived she would be the same age as the 23-year-old Misaki—he
would take her by the shoulders and assure her that she was not responsible for
her mother’s death. But he is not her father and is in no meaningful position
to tell her that. The two are bonded together by such terrible guilt from which
they both realize there is no way out, no one to free them from their feelings.
Together, they go on a small road trip,
a long voyage back to Misaki’s home village, and there she finds her old home,
still in crumbled pieces at the bottom of a snow-filled gorge. She throws
flowers at the site telling another story about an imaginary figure her mother
created at moments of non-violence, when
she played games with her daughter. She loved that version of her mother even
though she hated the other woman, she now realizes. And together the two lost
souls momentarily hug one another in forgiveness of themselves.
Back in the theater, Yūsuke brilliantly
performs Vanya, despite almost breaking down at the same moment he previously
had, but this surviving the scene, realizing as Sonya (played by the signing Yoo-na)
that he does have another to hold onto until death.
Basically, the movie ends here,
revealing just how difficult it has been to know any of these figures fully and
discovering that what seems peaceful on the outside is terribly conflicted
within. Some of the figures we have met have endured, others barely surviving,
and one, Kōji, has abandoned himself to the irrationality of life. Even now we
cannot piece together everything, nor should we imagine that we can or would
want to; to do so would be to take away the wonder not only of this movie, but
of all the individuals which this film and Chekhov’s Vanya have vaguely traced
out for us to see the shapes of our own existence.
The final scene is terribly banal. A
young woman in a COVID mask, surrounded by other such masked figures, shops in
a grocery store, finally filling a bag and taking it to the cashier to pay.
Asked if she needs a bag, the woman responds that she’s fine with what she has,
and leaves the store. She walks to the red car, removing her mask to reveal
that she is Misaki. A beautiful dog, like one owned by Yoo-na and the
dramaturge, waits in the back seat, as she drives off.
Either, Yūsuke has left two gifts
behind—far more obvious than those left by the girl for the soccer player—for
his appreciation for how she has helped transport him through a difficult time
in his life; or he has married the “other,” planning that the two of them will
help one another through the rest of their lives. The film allows us to choose
either alternative. But if one chooses the second possibility, he brings Hamaguchi’s
referential film much closer to another film classic influential throughout the
1960s, Alain Resnais’ 1959 Hiroshima mon Amour.
Los Angeles, February 16, 2022
Reprinted from World Cinema
Review (February 2022).
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