Drive My Car (2021)

After Yūsuke Kafuku’s wife dies, he must navigate his way through a world without her. The movie starts two years prior to this, where we are introduced to the couple in the opening scene of Drive My Car, where actor and director Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), a screenwriter who brainstorms story ideas with her husband during the afterglow of sex. At this time in his life, Yūsuke performs in a multilingual theater production of Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, and the film switches between scenes in the play and the complications building in Yūsuke’s real life, touching on parallels between the two.

Two years later, Yūsuke moves to Hiroshima to direct a new multilingual version of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. In the post-funeral part of the movie, as in the time when Yūsuke was working on Waiting for Godot, scenes from the play seem to reflect events in Yūsuke’s life, drawing us again into a more contemplative mood. When Yūsuke takes his new role, his daily routine is interrupted when he is required to take a driver, Misaki Watari (Tôko Miura). This concerns Yūsuke because his car is a kind of sanctuary where he listens to cassette tapes of his lines for practice, recordings which are narrated by his late wife, Oto. Not wanting to break his habit, though, he accepts his new fate and rehearses his lines aloud in the car anyway, as Misaki chauffers him around Hiroshima.

This deep exploration of grief and remembrance comes at a slow but captivating pace, and is aptly set to subtle visuals from cinematographer Hidetoshi Shinomiya, with Yūsuke’s bright red car making a striking contrast to the rest of the imagery. The story is based on Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name from the collection Men Without Women, who also wrote the novel Norwegian Wood, which was made into a film by my favorite director, Tran Anh Hung. Drive My Car was directed by Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, also known for Evil Does Not Exist, Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, and Happy Hour.