While watching Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car, there is a line of dialogue said by Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) that resonates with the movie’s central themes. “We must keep on living,” Yusuke whispers to his driver, Misaki Watari (Tōko Miura) as they stand overlooking her collapsed home due to a mudslide, comforting each other. A moment of fortitude and closeness is required for humans to feel close to one another, and this action is accepted by each other. There isn’t a moment of hesitation as Yūsuke and Misaki confess the secrets they had buried inside and hug each other for a very long time.
Yūsuke is a middle-aged widower who mourns the death of his wife Oto Kafuku (Reika Kirishima), seemingly dealing with the loss in his own way — but he isn’t, not really. He is an acclaimed theatre actor and plays the central character in an innovative play, where dialogue is performed in multiple languages. While he drives in his precious bright-red Saab 900, he uses a memorization technique that involves him listening to a tape of Oto performing the characters’ lines to practise his lines in the play. His wife is a screenwriter, who comes up with the plot during and after sex and narrates it to Yūsuke. Yūsuke recites them back to her while they drive to work, as she doesn’t remember the plot. Two years after his wife suddenly dies from a cerebral haemorrhage, he drives to Hiroshima in his bright-red Saab for a two-month residency. The theatre company requires him to be chauffeured by a 23-year-old woman, Misaki, due to a previous incident of an artist hitting a pedestrian with their vehicle. Yūsuke protests at first, unwilling to let anyone drive his Saab, but later gives in because Misaki is a skilled driver.
At the audition, the young actor Kōji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), who worked with Oto on her television shows, comes in to audition for one of the characters. Kōji and a handful of other actors get picked to perform in the play. As Yūsuke and Misaki drive through the roads of Hiroshima, he practises his lines. The driver and the actor slowly get to know each other and soon become acquainted, revealing information about their lives. Soon after, Kōji gets in trouble with the law and Yūsuke must decide to continue with the play or abandon it, instead of facing his feelings about his wife’s death.
There is a profound closeness and intimacy within Drive My Car and how it uses the Saab as a confession box for the central character. When Yūsuke and Misaki are conversing about their lives before they met, there are no judgments, only the echo of their voices being heard by each other in the car. Initially, when Yūsuke plays the tape while Misaki drives down the road, he doesn’t mention that it is his dead wife’s voice. Even Misaki doesn’t ask any questions. She does, however, familiarise the tape enough for her to understand that the person on the tape is someone close to him. Not soon after, she opens up to him about her mother. But her confession is layered, and so is Yūsuke’s.
But Drive My Car’s most important aspect of the plot is Yūsuke and Misaki’s transformative journey. Yūsuke has neither gotten over Oto’s death nor the fact that she was seeing Kōji. Yūsuke leaves for a business trip and when his flight gets moved to a different day, he returns home only to find Oto making love to Kōji in their living room. Without saying a word, he leaves. After Yūsuke comes back from the trip, he makes no mention of it to Oto, and they go on about their lives until one day, she wants to talk to him about something. That night when Yūsuke comes back home, he finds her dead on the floor. He never gets the chance to find out what Oto wanted to talk about, the guilt of not coming back home early eating at him for two years. In truth, Yūsuke meant to come home early, but was so scared of the possible outcome of their marriage changing, he drove around in his Saab to buy some time. When he finally tells Misaki the truth, the guilt and weight on his shoulders are relieved. Misaki consoles him, and he does the same for her too.
Misaki, in turn, tells Yūsuke about her mother’s death. The truth is that she was left to die in the collapsed home while Misaki climbed out of the rubble. The guilt of leaving her mother behind was something that she had been running away from for quite some time. Without a home and a parent to take care of her, she drove around the country until she ended up taking a job as a garbage truck driver. Misaki opens up about her life and the hardships that she had to go through in her small town. In one scene, she tells Yūsuke that she learned how to drive her mother from home to the station every day in her town. She explains the details of her story as she drives down the pristine roads of Hiroshima, overlooking the ocean, the entire scene feeling like a breeze.
Both of these characters learn and grow from their experiences of death and loss, but it’s the consolation and grief between them which makes it even more heartfelt. As Yūsuke and Misaki are overlooking her collapsed home, she tells him about her childhood and her mother’s illness. When she was young she wasn’t able to fight for herself as her mother disciplined her; but when her mother’s alternative personality was present, that was when Misaki was the happiest. What she regrets the most is not getting help for her mother’s mental health and the uncertainty of which personality was present when she was crushed underneath the rubble. Alas, there wasn’t anyone that she could speak to about her mother’s death and the guilt she carried. She carried on in quiet solitude until Yūsuke came along, who also had experience dealing with the death of a loved one. Their pain and suffering are shared, and as they open up about Oto and Misaki’s mother’s death, it becomes a tale of loss and forgiveness. “We must keep on living,” Yūsuke says, as he hugs Misaki. It’s sincere and emotional; both of these characters needed to find consolation for their guilt to move on from their terrible experiences. Yūsuke finally forgives himself for not coming home early the night Oto died, the audience knowing how burdened he was carrying the guilt around until he cried to Misaki (and Oto), asking for forgiveness. In the end, they embrace each other and remind themselves that everything will be okay.
What Drive My Car does with the themes of forgiveness and loss in its three-hour duration is embrace grief in different stages. Yūsuke and Misaki never had the chance to confess their secrets, as they have never been close to anyone other than their loved ones that passed away. It’s about forgiving oneself and the act of exploring where the root of grief and loss are located within us. It is evident in Drive My Car that humans need each other for consolation — people are not meant to grieve alone. The movie shares the language of loss and grief and captures the moments of sorrow and joy profoundly and heartbreakingly.
Time sails by in Drive My Car despite the complex narrative. The Saab that Yūsuke owns is a stage for him, even a confession box. A lot of pivotal conversations have taken place in that car. In one scene, Kōji sits in the back seat beside Yūsuke and narrates Oto’s latest chapter in her story, which Yūsuke had never heard. Yūsuke listens carefully, fully aware that Kōji has no knowledge that the former knows of the latter’s affair with Oto, his eyes shining inside a dimly lit car. Kōji speaks gently about how a young girl breaks into her crush’s room and kills an intruder but later confesses on camera that she killed him. The narration is delivered quietly, almost alienating in its own way.
Yūsuke’s Saab is his life. It’s where he works, sleeps, and talks about what is most dear to him. He tells stories with mournful eyes and displays emotions directly into the camera. Drive My Car continues this momentum during Misaki’s speeches, too. Perhaps this is a creative and technical approach for Hamaguchi to allow the audience to feel connected to the characters, which makes sense due to the complex themes in the movie. It’s a soul-stirring and emotionally driven narrative that focuses on dialogue and narration to translate the story’s central dynamic.
Drive My Car is precise and delicate, and sometimes graceful in its direction and delivery. Even when the narrative shifts from Yūsuke to Misaki, both characters’ stories are rich and meaningful. Three effortless hours of confessing and communion between them feels like a breeze. Hamaguchi’s soft touch is painful yet overwhelming at times, as their stories come to a shattering close. By the time the audience reaches the end, there is serenity and hope that everything and everyone will be alright. Drive My Car embraces a realistic and gentle exploration of emotions within space. It is absolutely incredible, and the titular car could be described as another character that imposes itself in the scenes with Yūsuke and Misaki.
