Drive My Car, Cannes review: a profoundly beautiful, haunting Murakami adaptation
Dir: Ryusuke Hamaguchi; Starring: Hidetoshi Nishijima, Toko Miura, Reika Kirishima, Masaki Okada, Park Yoo-rim, Jin Dae-young. Cert TBC, 179 min.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s films are like gin poured over ice: cool, clean and gradually dizzying as you absorb them sip by sip. That makes the Japanese director a perfect candidate for Haruki Murakami adaptations, and his superb latest feature – one of the best-liked competition titles at Cannes this year – is a notably great one. Billed as an adaptation of the short story with which it shares a title, it is actually an expended version of two Murakami tales, deftly pleated: Drive My Car and Scheherazade, both of which were published in the Japanese author’s 2014 collection Men Without Women.
The particular man it concerns is Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a well-regarded Tokyo stage actor who is invited by a theatre in Hiroshima to stage a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, in the innovative multi-lingual style for which he’s renowned. As for the car, it’s a vintage Saab 900 Turbo in a shade of tomato red that it doesn’t seem to share with anything else around. It’s always moving through the film’s stunningly photographed world – Tokyo's grey urban clutter, the pristine snows of Hokkaido, the glistening blue of the Seto Inland Sea – but it never looks like it quite belongs anywhere in it.
The vehicle is Yusuke’s pride and joy, and also a clearing house for his psyche. It’s where he decompresses before and after rehearsals, and also where practices his lines, listening to the other actors’ dialogue on a tape recorded by his late wife Oto (a terrific Reika Kirishima, who also appeared in the film adaptation of Murakami’s Norwegian Wood), a TV screenwriter who would fall into a storytelling trance after sex, adding new scenes to her latest project.
When Yusuke arrives in Hiroshima, he’s dismayed to learn the theatre insists on him using a driver – a sullen young woman called Misaki (Toko Miura) – and resents this intrusion into his private world. But another trespasser is also present: a young heartthrob actor called Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), with whom Yusuke strongly suspects his wife was having an affair before her death. This lean, elfishly handsome young man, whose career has been damaged by a scandal that’s initially only alluded to, slipped into Oto’s funeral – the couple’s life together is covered in a spellbinding 40-minute prologue – only to turn up again in Hiroshima to audition for a role in Yusuke’s production. To the astonishment of everyone, Yusuke casts him as Vanya – a role the theatre was obviously hoping their star director would take for himself. Is he engineering a self-inflicted compound cuckolding: the young man who stole his wife now gets to steal one of his greatest roles? Or is there something else at play? Over drinks one evening, Yusuke tells the younger actor that by speaking Chekhov’s words, the contents of his heart will inescapably emerge. Just as Yusuke has faith in Swedish engineering, the machinery of the play is something he intimately trusts.
As rehearsals begin, the cast grows increasingly exasperated with his methods, which don’t seem to extend beyond sitting around a table running lines. One actress asks how she can do better.
“You don’t have to do better,” Yusuke replies. “Just simply read the text.”
Drive My Car unfolds over a leisurely three hours, and while the pace is too measured for the time to fly by, every second is put to optimal use. The lives of various supporting players slide gently into focus, including Misaki, whose own past chimes delicately, though not over-tidily, with Yusuke’s, and the twosome’s gradual thawing towards one another is a joy to behold. (A shot of them holding their cigarettes out of the Saab’s sunroof on a night-time drive is a dream: two soft, small, orange points of light moving in wobbly unison through the dark.)
As Yusuke, Nishijima gives a performance of consummate subtlety and psychological precision, as his wife’s betrayal and death – and, yes, love – continue to haunt him into widowhood. Like her final script – a weird, haunting tale of a schoolgirl’s sexual obsession with a classmate – the story of their marriage is frustratingly unresolved. Takatsuki can help with that, of course, even though Yusuke might wish otherwise. Hamaguchi has made a profoundly beautiful film about making peace with the role in front of you, and playing it with all your might.
Screening at the Cannes Film Festival. A UK release has yet to be announced.