In "Drive My Car", We Follow the Winding Path
A review and reflection on Ryusuke Hamaguchi's film adaptation of the Murakami story.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car (an adaptation of a Haruki Murakami book, Men Without Women) is a film about artists; about those who tell stories. Indeed it is about ‘the artist’s struggle for his integrity… a kind of metaphor,’ as James Baldwin described it, ‘for the struggle, which is universal and daily, of all human beings on the face of this terrifying globe, to get to become human beings.’
This struggle is not one of dominating the world, as Ursula K. Le Guin understands it in The Carrier Bag Theory of Fiction, but is an act of making meaning from the world, the act of being artists, of telling stories. Too often, though, we have ‘let ourselves become part of the killer story’, the story of ‘how Cain fell on Abel and how the bomb fell on Nagasaki… and how the missiles will fall on the Evil Empire’. If telling stories was what made us human, and those stories were about how ‘to make a weapon and kill with it, then evidently I was either extremely defective as a human or not human at all’. The Killer Story says the first object of human technology was a stick or a bone or a rock for killing; the Carrier Bag Theory says something altogether different. Humans gathered more than they hunted, and one cannot gather without a ‘leaf a gourd a shell a net a bag a sling a sack a bottle a pot a box a container. A holder. A recipient.’ Against the linear, violent shape of The Killer Story, Le Guin takes the winding path. ‘The natural, proper, fitting shape of the novel might be that of a sack, a bag. A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings.’
Midway through Hamaguchi’s film, when most of its questions have been opened, and few have been answered, protagonist Yusuke, a theatre director, asks his driver, a young woman called Misaki, not to go straight home, but to take him somewhere nice, anywhere. We find our characters in silhouette, watching a colossal robotic arm slowly moving a pile of waste from one side of a dark storage room to another. White plastic carrier bags drift from the arm ‘like snow’, as it swings across the cavern. As they leave, Yusuke and Misaki pass a glass-walled control room; in the background, a live feed of the incinerator the plastic is destined for is seen on a tv screen, only barely.
‘A book holds words. Words hold things. They bear meanings’ A film holds images, holds sound, holds meanings. Drive my Car, like Le Guin’s novels, is a carrier bag, a vessel. It is a film of many layers: reality and fiction, present and past, reason and emotion, language and meaning; these dichotomies are all made dualities.
Violence happens but remains off-screen, only imagined. Yusuke’s wife Oto narrates stories after sex, for her partner to recite back to her in the morning; in one story, a girl breaks into the bedroom of a boy she likes while he is at school and his parents at work, taking something small, and leaving something of herself as a memento to be found: a tampon, her underwear, the mark of her tears on his pillow. One day a second intruder comes into the house, a burglar, who the girl stabs in the left eye, killing him; mirroring Yusuke’s glaucoma, sustained in a minor car accident. A scandalised young actor is photographed by a passerby, before disappearing off-screen for a moment while other characters arrange themselves. Later he is arrested for a man’s death. He goes calmly to the police officer and admits to his crime. In Oto’s story, the girl confesses to her murder by speaking into the new security camera the boy’s family has installed on his house. ‘I killed him. I killed him. I killed him.’ It is through these parallelisms that the film constructs its strange and subtle reality.
In another narrative layer, Yusuke is reinventing Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya as a multilingual production for a festival in Hiroshima. The Japanese actors don’t know what the others are saying, and vice-versa. The actor playing Sonia performs in Korean sign language, using her arms over Vanya’s chest to express the latter’s despair in a way he can’t recognise himself. The script is displayed for the audience in supertitles in three concurrent languages. In rehearsals, characters are first directed to read à l’italienne, ‘like robots’. The point to both techniques is a kind of phenomenological reduction: rather than the words themselves, what rises is the essential meanings they bear.
But this is also a film about the failure of that reduction. Like the video feed of the incinerator, the anguish and anger of Yusuke’s grief, guilt, and love, are only ever in the background, pushed into the shadow. The noise is subdued, signal remains. But anger, grief, guilt, love — they are a noisy mix. By not translating anything, the difficulty of the translator’s task is ignored; the difficulty of communication itself. And it is Yusuke’s instinct to rationalise and reduce that breeds his guilt, his inaction, his grief. Early in the film we see him walk in on his wife having sex with the young actor from her latest TV production. He hears them first, through the front door and enters quietly. Observing from the hallway, only a hint of reaction is betrayed in his face, and even that quickly neutralised; he leaves without being seen. A few days later Oto asks to speak with him when he returns from work that evening, but too scared to confront the messy reality of his relationship he drives around aimlessly, returning late to the apartment to find Oto dead from a brain haemorrhage.
In this there is something of Hiroshima Mon Amour, not only in its consequential location, but also in the complex layers of its dealings with history and the burden of memory. Like Oto and Yusuke in Drive My Car, Hiroshima opens with a story told after sex. ‘You saw nothing in Hiroshima,’ Lui tells Elle. She presses back, ‘I’ve always wept for Hiroshima’s fate. Always,’ only for Lui to say ‘No. What was there to weep for?’. He can’t bear the imagination of Hiroshima, his family killed there by the bomb while he was away on duty; while Elle can’t bear the memory of Lui, scared by a previous love cut short in the war. In the film’s final lines she cries ‘I’ll forget you. I’m forgetting you already!’, before saying ‘Hiroshima — that’s your name.’ She may weep for him only if the tragedy of their relationship is remembered by the unimaginable tragedy of Hiroshima.
But in Drive My Car the grief is less histrionic: not characterised by pure dichotomies of forgetting and remembering, but by the banal reality of the struggle to ‘live our lives’, as Sonia signs in the last lines of Uncle Vanya. Like in The Bear Hunt, with grief ‘we can’t go over it, we can’t go under it, we have to go through it.’
If the film is a vessel, so is its titular car. Yusuke’s beloved Saab 900 holds his grief and guilt and love through a cassette tape of Oto reading Uncle Vanya with Vanya’s parts missing, which Yusuke dictates by rote. But it is also a vessel in the sense that it transports.
‘Take me somewhere to think, somewhere peaceful,’ Yusuke says to Misaki, when struck with the difficult decision to play the part of Vanya himself (something he’s been unable to do since Oto’s death: ‘When you say his lines, it drags out the real you… I can’t bear that anymore’) or cancel the production — as if seeking somewhere to perform his reduction and calculate the answer. But something shifts; he asks to see the village Misaki grew up in, destroyed by a landslide five years before. Thus begins a days-long drive into the snow of Hokkaido (we are reminded of the plastic bags) and two extended cuts of silence; leaving them standing before the pile of timber and rubble that was once Misaki’s house.
Until now both have been with grief, with guilt; each somehow implicated in the deaths of others by their own inaction. Yusuke wonders what Oto would have told him, or if he could have saved her if he came home early; Misaki wonders if she should have tried to save her abusive mother from the landslide while she managed to escape. Or, they are with grief, but at a distance from grief: Yusuke speaks of his wife in the present tense, despite the two years since her death; Misaki commits herself to driving perfectly, as her mother taught her to, without needing to eat or sleep. There is something incomplete, something hollow, about their humanness, like Yusuke’s robotic readings in the rehearsals for Vanya.
In Hokkaido, though, they are faced with their shadows: into the detritus, into the noise. The tender underside of Misaki’s relationship to her mother emerges, while Yusuke’s anger and regret finally break open, and the past can be seen anew. ‘Isn’t it just possible that your wife loved you, and constantly desired other men?’ Asks Misaki, whom we’ve now learned to be the age Yusuke and Oto’s daughter would have been had she not died as a child.
It would be wrong to describe it as a moment of overcoming, there is nothing heroic here. Nor is it a moment of peace. Instead, it is a moment of becoming unstuck, of going through it, of finally holding the interwoven, messy threads of life in one place, in one bag. It is another turn in the road of the artists’ struggle to become human beings. ‘Neither resolution nor stasis but continuing process,’ writes Le Guin. It is the ‘womb of things to be and tomb of things that were.’
And here lies the critique of this film, that it’s hindered by the ambiguity of its ending; that it doesn’t make a judgement, is neither triumphant, nor tragic. But that would be to miss the point: life is a noisy mix; in Drive My Car, we follow the winding path.