Intersections

There's a lot to like in Ryusuke Hamaguchi's "Drive My Car," as well as much to potentially find fault with--at about three hours runtime, including forty-some minutes before the opening credits even begin (like watching a short film immediately followed by its epic-length sequel), combining several different languages, and stories-within-stories and plays-within-plays and, of course, driving a car, there's just a lot of traffic here. It feels like it combines two or three different stories, because it does, as adapted from a collection by Haruki Murakami for which I'm unfamiliar. I'm also not too familiar with the plays-within-the play here, Beckett's "Waiting for Godot" and Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya," although I understand them both, surely important for the existential angst of the picture, to have been composed by atheists.

Also, the mirroring of the tragic everyday and violence and ultimate resolution through the friendship with a godly young woman in "Uncle Vanya" is rather straightforwardly reflected in the movie's narrative, except to literally mute Sonya's (ironic) Christian appeal (sounds very Dostoevsky's "Crime and Punishment" and his Sonya there) on stage while the protagonist comes to recognize the presence on the "world's a stage" road of the previously unnoticed "driver" in his life, which makes for an ambiguous, if not confused, philosophical and religious diegesis. Perhaps, there's also some overlapping relevance regarding Beckett's Posso's blindness and the "blind spot" of the protagonist here.

Additionally, "Drive My Car" reminds me of a couple other movies, or threads therefrom, one superficially and the other on a more emotionally impactful level. Superficially, it strikes one as a Japanese variation on class with the front-seat-back-seat driving of the American commentary on race of "Green Book" (2018), which itself is highly reminiscent of "Driving Miss Daisy" (1989), a play and a film that does the same thing, but somewhat reversed (i.e. the black person and the white person change seats). More interesting here is the connection to Alain Resnais's "Hiroshima mon amour" (1959), which has had an extensive influence, such as in the oeuvres the likes of Wong Kar-Wai and Terrence Malick, although Hamaguchi decidedly favors prose over poetry. Nevertheless, there are intersections, and intertexts, of characters consumed with memories of other characters, movies with those of other movies, stories commented upon by stories from the past.

I think the "down-the-road" ending, and from the perspective of the character who serves as our surrogate spectator of the play and is marked by the semiotic trace no less, alluding to our ongoing global catastrophe of lost lives and a changed, mournful world, but perhaps also hope for the future in moving on and the literal healing power of art, confirms the greater allusion of the picture's Hiroshima setting, which reportedly was relocated from the short story of the same name or stories' Tokyo, to the site of the first atomic bombing, giving greater heft to the reflections of artists in both Renais and Hamaguchi's pictures. The playing of recorded music, and during a sex scene, and the recorded line readings seem to call forth its predecessor, but particularly the walk through the Naka trash incineration plant.

I especially like the erotic business of sex inspiring the writer's stories, the conclusion of one of which provides for one of the movie's most dramatic moments. Indeed, there are quite a few instances here of powerfully emotive scenes creeping up on one at unexpected moments. The "blind spot" business with the protagonist director-actor character and his casting a mute, signing actress seems mostly meaningless at first, but it ultimately underscores as sight analogy the visual primacy of stage and screen art in the coda to "Uncle Vanya." Art as a whole other language on top of the multilingual production. I like that the characters' names have deeper, doubled meanings, too, and that the picture translates them for the non-Japanese speaker.

With some underwhelming if not plain bad acting in other movies nominated for Oscars this season, it's disappointing "Drive My Car" didn't receive any acting nods to go along with its four nominations, including Best Picture (which it'll probably lose, my assumption once upon a time that "Parasite" (2019) would lose, too, like all foreign-language films before it, whereas the overrated "Driving Miss Daisy" and the overrated "Green Book" both won--go figure, and we'll see). Perhaps, besides cultural and language barriers, that's because the acting here is understated--even though that's largely the source of its effect. Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tōko Miura, Masaki Okada, Reika Kirishima, and Park Yoo-Rim are all impressive in the main roles--all storytellers in some form--acting, directing, reciting, telling, or writing them. Even the driver becomes a storyteller and ends up stealing the spotlight from the nominal protagonist. I don't mind that her revelation comes late, of a late unseen character who in way, like the actors, was two characters in one. Lots of reflective reflexive doubling. Even the business with the disgraced star actor's overzealous aggression against cell-phone photographers makes sense as part of the control of representation and stories, like those shared in coitus (art as promiscuous) with the director's writer-wife.

At last, I'm two for eight in supporting the most-recent Best Picture nominations (and I hope "CODA" and "Licorice Pizza" both pan out for a solid 40% category approval rating from me). Even better, it's seemingly a lock that the Best International Film Oscar winner this time will be a truly international, and multilingual, affair about communication and language. I won't dwell on its faults, which I see as comparatively minor and so will only briefly mention some. Granted, although I like the underlying story-trafficking metaphor, there's too much driving, which paradoxically sometimes seems to stall rather than propel the narrative forward. Like the excessive car fetishizing, I don't see the point of the emphasis on cigarette smoking. It may explain the subdued nature of the characters who simultaneously seem capable of violent emotional outbursts if not receiving a regular nicotine dose, and the erasure of smoking in Hollywood drivel annoys me to no end, but why dwell on it. The general malaise can be overbearing. The runtime overall could benefit from some trimming. For all the bumps in the road, though, it's a moving ride that rather than make one forget there's a driver, instead, constantly reminds (ironically or not) through its meta-narrative construction that there is very much a driver, or drivers, behind the wheel.

(Added to my list of pandemic-related titles.)