A prosperous year for Japanese director and screenwriter Ryusuke Hamaguchi, who presented two feature films in quick succession, the romantic drama Tales of chance and other fantasies (release scheduled for April 6) and, above all, this tour de force named Drive my Car (drive my chariot, in its version subtitled in French), noticed at Cannes (Screenplay Prize, 2021) and tipped for the Oscar for best international film. A drama of nearly three hours in which an old red SAAB becomes the confessional of characters who have to live in mourning and regrets, with the existentialist theater of Anton Chekhov in the background.
Actor and director, Yūsuke Kafuku (fine performance by Hidetoshi Nishijima) shares his life with Oto (Reika Kirishima), a screenwriter who, he discovers, is cheating on him with a young actor. Yūsuke takes the blow placidly, as if he doesn’t want to disturb the otherwise happy (in appearance) relationship with the one he loves dearly and who gave him a child, who died at the age of four. However, we detect the torment of Oto, who seems determined to confess everything to Yūsuke, which will not happen since she will be struck down by an aneurysm before he returns home.
It is only after this preamble of about forty minutes that we see the opening credits of the film. Two years after Oto’s death, the director drives his old SAAB 900 to Hiroshima, where he has accepted a two-month creation residency, the time to edit Uncle Vanya by Chekhov, whose text he knows intimately and remembers along the way since to prepare for the main role, he had once asked Oto to record the lines on a cassette, which he listens to on repeat. The administrators of the theater, however, impose on him someone to drive him from the theater to the residence reserved for him, a young driver of few words named Misaki (Tōko Miura).
The slowly developing relationship between the director and the driver will count at least as much in the film’s subject as that between Oto and his former spouse. To the themes of love, creation and mourning is thus added that of communication: the unspoken, free speech, up to a form of redemption in openness to others. The Chekhov staged by Yūsuke is also multilingual, with actors speaking Japanese, Mandarin, and even Korean sign language.
And one of the cast members ofUncle Vanya is none other than Kōji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), Oto’s young lover. There too, a strong and liberating communication will be established between the young actor and the experienced director – during a memorable scene, the meticulous eye and the discreet gaze of the camera of Hamaguchi stare for a long time at the face of the actor, sitting with the director in the backseat of the SAAB, as he unveils the end of a story invented by Oto.
The three hours of this drama sometimes taking on the appearance of road movieinitiatory — particularly during the finale, when the director asks his chauffeur to drive him to her native village — the dialogues fly by, reinforced by the mise-en-abîme caused by the theatrical rehearsals that are part of of the film’s narrative, keep us awake. Drive my Caris a refined, subtle and poignant film.