Drive My Car

Grade: B

I hunkered down in preparation of viewing Drive My Car – a Japanese film, just one minute shy of 3 hours. The opening credits don’t start until 40 minutes in. A composer is credited, but I don’t recall hearing a score, which means the little music that does appear is unobtrusive.

Yusuke is a theatre artist. He seems to have a fulfilling marriage to his wife, Oto. When he comes home early one day and finds his wife naked in the living room with another man, he turns around and quietly shows himself out, unseen. He doesn’t doubt her love for him, nor wants to rock the boat or upset the status quo. One day, Oto dies unexpectedly of a cerebral hemorrhage.

2 years later, Yusuke is in Hiroshima, where he has been hired to direct a production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. This movie takes place in the present day, and our lead character is still hanging in there with his 2-door Saab with the cassette player. He listens to the same tape over and over – a recording made by his late wife of lines from Uncle Vanya, back when he played the role, to help him learn. The car is his pride and joy, and he has asked to be put up in a hotel that’s a good drive away from the theatre. However, their policy is that all artists must have a driver, so Yusuke places his vehicle in the capable hands of Misaki, a young woman who also has a past that includes grief, loss, and second-guessing. It begins as silent drives, while he asks for the tape to be played continuously while he sits in the back seat like Miss Daisy. But a friendship, bond, and understanding forms between the two as they share more with each other, and increasingly heavy conversations transpire.

Uncle Vanya prominently weaves in and out of the plot and theme of Drive My Car. I get the feeling that I missed out on part of the experience because I’m not familiar with that piece. You might have a leg up on things if you are.

If you have the ability to customize your audio/captions when watching a foreign language [for you] film, the obvious best way to go is the original audio with subtitles of your choice. This way, you won’t miss a word, and you get the essence and emotion from the original actors playing the moment, not recorded long after the fact by a person in a studio who wasn’t in the scene. You’ll quickly get used to reading everything at the bottom of the screen. There’s a punchline in Life Is Beautiful that lands much funnier with captions than if one was watching it dubbed in their language. Parasite is one of my favorite movies, and I can’t imagine watching it any other way.

I continue to be fascinated by parallels I find between films when I watch several in rapid succession. There is a performer cast in Drive My Car’s Uncle Vanya who does everything in sign language, which made me think of CODA – that fantastic movie I saw a couple days ago. She has a bit that could have satisfyingly ended the film, but it does cut to an extraneous epilogue at a grocery store where everyone’s wearing masks, just to remind us that this takes place in the present day. I ended up enjoying Drive My Car. It is a worthy slow-burner.

Grade: B