Kafuku is methodical and soft-spoken, a creature of habit: Driving his red Saab 900 each day around Tokyo, he rehearses his lines by listening to audiotapes that Oto has made for him.
(Kafuku is a theater star, Oto an acclaimed screenwriter.) You also feel the sadness that hangs over them, signaled by the somber cast of Eiko Ishibashi’s score and the dark, enveloping shadows of Hidetoshi Shinomiya’s cinematography. You sense that this storytelling is a ritual for them, that sex is a source of creative inspiration as well as pleasure. Silhouetted against the dusky Tokyo light outside their window, Oto begins to tell Kafuku a story, involving a teenage girl and a secret intrusion, that has just come to her in the midst of their lovemaking. That uncertainty creeps into the seductive, hypnotic opening sequence, which finds Kafuku and his wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), lost in a post-coital haze. This is a movie that understands how seldom people really know or understand each other even when they are speaking the same language. (The movie, which will represent Japan in the Academy Awards race for international feature, won the screenplay award at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.) But the filmmakers also harbor a certain skepticism about words, with their capacity for imprecision, evasion and outright fabrication. They more than rise to that occasion - and so, with shimmering elegance and lucidity, does “Drive My Car.” On the one hand, Hamaguchi and his co-writer, Tamakasa Oe, are clearly enamored of words: There are a lot of them in this nearly three-hour movie, adapted and significantly elaborated from a 2014 short story by Haruki Murakami. It presents an unusual challenge for Kafuku’s actors, who must draw on all their expressive powers to achieve an eloquence that transcends words. It follows a middle-age actor and director, Yûsuke Kafuku (a superb Hidetoshi Nishijima), who specializes in experimental multilingual theater productions, the latest of which is “Uncle Vanya.” The play’s still the thing, but you’ve never seen or heard Chekhov quite like this, in a Babel-esque collision of tongues including Japanese, Mandarin, Korean and Korean sign language. Because moviegoing carries risks during this time, we remind readers to follow health and safety guidelines as outlined by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and local health officials.Īt the simplest of its many intricate levels, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” is a masterpiece - haunting and true, melancholy and wise - inspired by another. The Times is committed to reviewing theatrical film releases during the COVID-19 pandemic.
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