It’s hard not to get lost in Drive My Car, a film that runs nearly three hours but feels like a breeze. Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi is a master dramatist who excels at lengthy conversation scenes, in which nothing happens and yet everything happens — in which the camera remains largely still, but the earth tilts on its axis. A story about grief and lingering emotional mysteries, it follows a renowned middle-aged theater director, Kafuku Yusuke (Nishijima Hidetoshi), or “Mr. Kafuku,” through an esoteric stage production where language is key, but what ails him is far beyond words. Nominated for four Academy Awards (Best Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, and International Feature Film), it arrives on HBO Max on March 2 and brings with it the opportunity to immerse yourself in something wonderfully melancholic, and precisely reflective of the current moment. It may not be a COVID-19 film, but it’s the perfect story for the pandemic era, ruminating on isolation and loss of control in subtle, methodical ways that bide their time before hitting you all at once.
Its plot is straightforward, though it unfurls in complex ways, and via a unique structure that makes for a joyful discovery. This review is spoiler-free — nothing in it hasn’t already been shown in the trailers — but the film is worth watching cold.
Two years after the death of Kafuku’s wife, Oto (Kirishima Reika) — a TV writer who had been sleeping with another man, though Kafuku never had the chance to confront her — the director takes up a two-month residency in Hiroshima in order to cast and stage a festival production of Uncle Vanya, the 1898 play by Anton Chekhov. Kafuku’s routine involves driving for long hours in his bright red Saab 900 while learning and relearning the play, repeating the lines back and forth with the help of a cassette tape narrated by Oto. However, the festival’s rules force him to be driven around by a chauffeur, a quiet young woman named Misaki (Miura Toko), a scenario to which Kafuku is forced to adapt as he also begins rehearsing with a fiery young actor who he suspects may have been the other man in his marriage, Takatsuki (Okada Masaki).
As is the case with several of Hamaguchi’s films, these volatile dynamics don’t lead to explosive confrontations, but rather, to subdued conversations that build over time until they become enrapturing, bursting at the seams with unspoken tensions. This approach exists in perfect harmony with characters like Kafuku and Misaki, people who keep their tragic pasts pressured tightly under solemn expressions. But while Misaki’s backstory unfolds over the course of the main plot, Kafuku’s is largely laid out in an extended prologue that lasts about 40 minutes, after which the credits finally appear. It’s an intriguing structural decision that splits Drive My Car into two unequal but completely distinct parts, and the titles which appear on screen play both as if they’re the closing to one film and the opening to another. In some ways, Kafuku’s story seems to end here (or at least, hit pause here) as he’s left to deal with both unimaginable loss, and an emotional black hole stemming from the lack of closure over Oto’s affair.
This sets the stage for a story in which Kafuku’s unique approach to Chekhov (and his equally unique driving routine) cocoon him in an emotional iron maiden. Each decision he makes is completely impenetrable to his frustrated cast, though the prologue gives us a small window into his reasoning and his many wounds which are yet to heal. His staging methods bring together a number of international actors, who each perform the play in their own dialects, as a screen behind them displays subtitles in different languages. On its surface, it’s a wonderfully inclusive experiment, though it makes rehearsing a nightmare. However, this approach is part and parcel of the story’s emotional puzzle, in which the focus on words is a distraction from the silences between them.
The prologue, for instance, portrays an intimate ritual between Kafuku and Oto, where she spins stories while on the verge of orgasm, which she later turns into her teleplays. Rather than appreciating what this ritual says about their relationship, Kafuku fixates on one of her stories which was left incomplete, just as he fixates on the lingering question of why Oto slept with other men despite their clear love for one another. However, the answers he seeks — and begins to find, when he reluctantly spends time with Takatsuki — may be disappointingly (and hauntingly) simple. Ironically, this director who loves staging Chekhov, a master of subtext, recalls his own tragic love story in superficial, black-and-white terms, even though he considers it a winding mystery he isn’t destined to solve.
Hamaguchi and co-screenwriter Oe Takamasa adapted Drive My Car from Murakami Haruki’s short story of the same name, expanding on minor details and turning Kafuku from an actor into an actor-director. This makes the idea of control central to the film’s version of Kafuku, not only in his tyrannical rehearsals, but in his isolated moments too. Driving his Saab, and driving it smoothly, is a way for him to stay centered, leading to an initial reluctance when the festival forces Misaki’s services onto him. However, this need for control is also a crutch, and it keeps him rooted in a painful past. Whenever he drives and rehearses, he’s surrounded by Oto’s disembodied voice, like a constant, ghostly reminder of difficult questions to which he never found answers. Beyond a point, there’s little difference between Kafuku exerting control over his present and being controlled by his past, and eventually learning to cede that control is something Hamaguchi builds slowly into the story’s fabric — even in rehearsal scenes that, at first, don’t appear to be about Kafuku’s past at all. Then again, Drive My Car is about how the present is always defined by the past, whether we like it or not.
As much as the film adapts Murakami’s story of Kafuku’s emotional isolation, it feels just as much of an adaptation of Chekhov. Not only because many of the lines from Uncle Vanya (which we see performed throughout) mirror Kafuku’s emotional crisis — which Nishijima buries beneath a stoic façade that begins to shift and slip at key moments, sometimes for fractions of a second — but because the way Hamaguchi captures and directs his actors feels directly descended from Russian theater director Konstantin Stanislavski, who staged many of Chekhov’s plays (and whose acting “system” would eventually influence modern “method acting”).
Stanislavski once wrote that Chekhov “often expressed his thought not in speeches, but in pauses or between the lines or in replies consisting of a single word.” Hamaguchi takes this approach to his performances — Nishijima and Miura’s in particular — where the crux of a conversation emerges in the gaps between dialogue. It's part of why he requires so few overt flourishes as a director. His scenes, edited by Yamazaki Azusa, have a distinct rhythm that pull you in using words, but he turns the camera back on you in silent moments, often through something as simple as a minor change in angle when cutting back to a close up, so that the next shot is more head-on, and the character’s gaze appears to break the fourth wall, inviting you into the conversation. The effect is subtle, but impactful, appearing during the film’s most emotionally charged beats, and creating fleeting connections to these otherwise lonely souls in their rare moments of honest vulnerability.
The more these moments appear, the more the complete emotional picture begins to emerge, carefully revealing the burdens carried by each character, and the way they need to catch glimpses of each other’s honest selves in order to fully recognize their own struggles. For instance, one of Kafuku’s actresses, the radiant Yoo-na (Park Yu-rim), who plays Sonya in Uncle Vanya and who speaks in Korean Sign Language, offers him a piercing honesty beyond words while the rest of the cast remains reluctant to confront him. She also plays a key role in how Chekhov’s text is even read (by Kafuku, and by us). Watching extended scenes of her non-verbal approach forces us to look far past the words of Uncle Vanya, as Chekhov and Stanislavski intended, until even the verbal translations by her delightfully chipper interpreter Yoon-soo (Jin Dae-yeon) begin to fade into background noise. Yoo-na is not only a vital part of Kafuku’s story behind the scenes, but on stage as well. She may not be a major character, but she plays into several of the film’s most moving scenes, acting as a calming contrast to Kafuku’s long, self-afflicting car rides, and offering him the chance to see Chekhov’s story — and thus, his own — not only in a new light, but for the briefest of moments, without being haunted by his past.
A work of shattering empathy, Drive My Car makes you stare long and hard at people’s withholding exteriors as it carefully chips away at them, revealing how they patiently bear their burdens, working without rest. Eventually, though, it offers a fleeting glance at the kind of relief that comes with sharing the worst parts of yourself with someone else — the kind that, though it quickly passes, can feel as serene as a gentle breeze rolling in through your car window as you drive on a summer’s night.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/MdLkZ7f
This could be a real lead forward for personal gaming... Revolutionise gaming
No comments:
Post a Comment