Public and private personas; id-ego discordance; the impossibility of being honest, actually honest — these porous rifts between real and performed selves distort our very reality, a phenomenon which has haunted director Ryusuke Hamaguchi throughout his career.
Peeling back additional layers of nuance with each progressive film, Hamaguchi’s rise to festival-circuit prominence has undoubtedly crescendoed this year (his other film at NYFF, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, is a similar marvel). Drive My Car continues to pick away at this paradox of telling the unembellished truth, and what better place to probe than in the debris of an imperfect marriage. It is at this intersection where we find the husband — somber, obstinate, and acclaimed theater actor Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima).
Sensual intimacy, or a lack thereof, takes center stage from the opening scene: a silhouette slinks into the foreground at dawn as an ethereal light blankets the mountain range beyond the window behind her. The figure recites the familiar nonsensical plot of a dream, only it’s not the typical scattered retelling. The prose and syntax seem as if they’ve been pored over for weeks.
In a surreal turn that typifies the horned-up pages of Haruki Murakami (some of which this film is adapted from), this is the married couple’s post-coital ritual. A forgetful playwright, Oto (Reiki Kirishima) can only efficiently articulate her new ideas after sex, and Kafuku accordingly records these thoughts for future reference.
This scene marks the beginning of Hamaguchi’s therapeutic throughline: unwanted realizations of previously inadmissible truth. For Oto, it’s spurred on through the language of corporeal sensation. The cracks of their marriage dawn on her in the abject bliss of “post-nut clarity.” Kafuku, on the other hand, is willfully oblivious to her innermost feelings. Numbed with complacency, he’s been unable to satisfy his wife’s needs, but more than that, he never wanted to know what they were in the first place.
Through his overzealous need for structure and normalcy, Kafuku’s solemn seriousness becomes his mortal sin. Nishijima disciplines himself well for this, his eyebrows rarely emoting, steady in their place. So regimented is Kafuku that his acting practices consist of a single, unending routine: running lines via the cassette player in his one domain of control — a red 1998 Saab 900 Turbo.
Kafuku’s relationship with this inanimate, yet undeniable, piece of craftsmanship is like that of an audience member in the embrace of the cinema. A rain of comfort suffuses through their synapses the second they slouch into their seat. Just as Kafuku keeps each specific in the Saab under his thumb, down to the pace at which he applies the brakes: it’s home.
A good drive, according to Kafuku, allows one to forget their body. Floating through space and time is his nirvana so long as there are smooth turns, proper signaling, and gradual stops. A briefly granted reprieve from our fickle containers, the autophilia of Drive My Car is to Titane what tender foreplay is to carnal exhaust piping.
The script (which won the award for Best Screenplay at Cannes) has received its due already, but it’d be heinous not to mention just how light-on-its-feet these three hours are. Carried by Nishijima’s vulnerable stoicism, his platonic countenance proves a soothing contrast to Eiko Ishibashi’s textured ambient-jazz score.
At its peaks, Drive My Car engulfs and eludes — its restorative power eschews simple definition. It’s a balm of kinesthetic hypnosis to the effect of awakening dormant bodily sensations. As Kafuku notices the fine details of driving, we float, weightless on Hamaguchi’s meticulous current of control. Thus, the allure is ironic, allowing us not to forget, but to remember the internal joys of a body, unburdened by lies, free in motion. One wishes, foolishly, that it might last forever.
