Drive My Car (2021)

 

I discussed this film with at length with some friends.  I said, based on Happy Hour, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, and this film, that a hallmark of Ryusuke Hamaguchi's work is the portrayal of ambiguous conversations, where we observe characters' words and body language at length, but cannot tell exactly what they mean in the moment.  Only in retrospect, having gained context from seeing the many facets of their lives and the lives of their interlocutors, does anything become clear.  

One of my friends was struck by the conversation Kafuku and Takatsuki have in Kafuku's car, where what matters is not just Takatsuki's words, but the look on his face and the tension in his body.  And part of the film's premise is that Kafuku directs plays in which the actors don't all speak the same language.  The actors' performance depends on reaction to nonverbal cues, so it becomes even more emphasized in this film than Hamaguchi's others.

Another friend noted a different hallmark of Hamaguchi's films, namely that they focus on times when people are experiencing major shifts in their lives.  The films track the messy process these shifts cause, of people adapting and sometimes losing fixtures in their lives.  The title Drive My Car refers to just this: at the start of the film, Kafuku has developed important routines around driving his car, and his adaptation to the change the film imposes on him involves coming to trust someone else with driving it.

Again, the film gives you little choice but to see the importance of nonverbal communication and to accompany characters through a variety of situations.  It deepens the film's portrayal of two people coming to trust each other.  It also affects our understanding of Kafuku's grief over the loss of his wife.  He comforts himself somewhat by listening to recordings of her voice.  But what's missing is the dynamism and uncertainty of a live conversation arising from personal history.  

At one point, Takatsuki insists that we can never really know what another person is thinking, and that our interactions with people only allow us to "look into your own heart."  But again, we can only fully understand Hamaguchi's characters in retrospect, and later on in the film we have reason to question how much we should trust this rather self-centered statement of theme.  It's reminiscent of Edward Yang's Yi Yi, in which a character similarly makes a grandiose claim that sounds important in the moment.  He later turns out to be a murderer.

To the characters other than Takatsuki, the faculty of live interpretation is at least as important as personal authenticity.  You can't know what another person is thinking, but you can guess, and no guess has to be final.  We see the stumbling, adaptive work the actors do to prepare a production of Uncle Vanya, and the film repeats lines from the play that comment directly on events in Kafuku's life.  Apparently he had some overlap with Chekhov.  What was in their "hearts" to begin with is not all that matters in the end, when we can finally see the fruits of their work.  Like in Taste of Cherry, another great film about driving cars, what matters is what we create in our uncertain attempts to reach people.