Two People Talking

Drive My Car a film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi.  With Hidetosha Nishijima, Toko, Miura, Reika Kirishima, Park YuRim.  Streaming on HBO Max.  *****

Drive My Car is so fundamentally strange a movie that it’s hard to know how to talk about it.  The full credits, for instance, don’t appear until forty minutes in.  There are still two hours and twenty minutes to go.  The car in question—an eye-popping red Saab—has the steering wheel on the left, and drives through Hiroshima and its surroundings, but in Japan people drive on the left and the steering wheels are on the right.

Most of the movie consists of scenes of two people talking, sitting or standing together, and their emotions are muted, but their faces full of feeling.  There are long scenes of rehearsals for the play Uncle Vanya, though there was no mention of the play in the story that the movie is based on.  The people reading for the play, and acting in it, speak a variety of languages, so the actors have to remember the lines of a language not their own, so they know when to come in.  Two major characters disappear unexpectedly and surprisingly at two different times, but the movie marches on.  Most of what I remember as I look back is pairs of people talking to each other.

It might be the best movie of the year.

Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetosha Nishijima) is a Japanese stage actor of serious drama, and specializes in these multi-lingual dramas; we see him early on in Waiting for Godot.  His beautiful wife Oto (Reika Kirishima) writes television dramas, and they love each other and have a solid marriage (and plenty of cash; their apartment is beautiful).  Early on, however, when Yusuke is supposed to be heading out of town and returns unexpectedly, he finds Oto making love with a young actor named Kashi (Misaki Okada).  Instead of storming in and upsetting the applecart, as most men would, he backs off and stays away for a while.  He never mentions to his wife that he saw them.

Not long after that, he’s heading off to work and she tells him she would like to talk that evening; he stalls about returning, perhaps not wanting to face that conversation, and when he finally gets there—I suppose I need a spoiler alert here, although the whole movie is predicated on this fact—she has died of a cerebral hemorrhage, though quite young.  Yusuke is suddenly a widower.

The film resumes two years later.  Yusuke has taken on the task of directing Uncle Vanya at a theater in Hiroshima, a play with which he seems to be obsessed.  He owns a tape in which his wife recorded all the lines except those of the title character, so he can speak them himself (for him the rhythm of the play is so exact that he knows exactly how long his lines should take).  He listens to this tape as he drives his Saab.  But at the theater in Hiroshima, he discovers that, though he will be living an hour away, there are liability issues which will not allow him to drive his car to and from rehearsals; they have hired a young woman named Koshi (Misaki Okada) to be his driver.  He balks at first (“Is it because I’m a young woman?” she asks), but eventually relents, and sits in the back seat to let her be his chauffeur.  He plays the Uncle Vanya tape every day, and sits there saying the lines.

We soon launch into the tryouts and rehearsals for the play, and one immediate surprise is that Kashi, his wife’s former lover, shows up.  The rest of the tryout group is a motley crew; many don’t look like actors, and they speak a variety of languages.  One of them is a Korean woman named Lee Yoon-a (Park Yoo Rom) who speaks only sign language.  Eventually Yusuke makes his choices.  Not only does he choose Lee Yoon-a for a major role, he picks Misaki—his wife’s lover—to play Uncle Vanya, not the role he auditioned for.

If all if this sounds dull—it’s a long setup for the primary action—all I can say is that it’s anything but.  Virtually every moment in this two hour and 59 movie is significant, even the scenes of the car driving the roads of Japan, and though the lines from Uncle Vanya seem to comment on what’s happening in the lives of the actors, there’s never some obvious connection, as if beating you over the head with it.

Eventually we focus on three characters, whom I think of as the husband, the young lover, and the driver (with the wife always hovering in the background), and as the film proceeds, we discover things about all of them that deepen the drama immensely (we take a brief detour into the reason Lee Yoon-a, the mute woman, has tried out, and even that is fascinating).  Again and again, in the film itself and in the play the characters are rehearsing, we watch scenes of two people talking, probing to understand each other and to understand themselves.  And though there aren’t any grand revelations, there are any number of smaller ones, so we appreciate all of these people, and in some ways all people, even more.

Toward the end we see one scene from the final production.  (The multi-lingual dialogue is translated on a screen above the stage, as at the opera.)  And though I will admit that I thought it crazy to cast a woman in this play who uses only sign language, I understood in that last scene that she was the perfect choice, and delivered in many ways the most memorable lines of the film.  Those lines were written by Chekov, of course.  But they’re a perfect capstone to the movie.

“We’ll live through the long, long days, and through the long nights. We’ll patiently endure the trials that fate sends our way. Even if we can’t rest, we’ll continue to work for others both now and when we have grown old. And when our last hour comes we’ll go quietly. And in the great beyond, we’ll say to Him that we suffered, that we cried, that life was hard. And God will have pity on us. Then you and I we’ll see that bright, wonderful, dreamlike life before our eyes. We shall rejoice, and with tender smiles on our faces, we’ll look back on our current sorrow. And then at last, we shall rest. I believe it. I strongly believe it from the bottom of my heart. When that time comes, we shall rest.”

This was so sublime a work of art that I immediately wanted to know more about it, to read the Murakami story and to find a good translation of Chekov, whom I haven’t read for years.  “Chekhov is terrifying,” the director says in one of his conversations.  “When you say his lines, it draws out the real you.  Don’t you feel it?”

Perhaps so.  In any case, I can’t recommend this film enough.