For the movie, Hamaguchi (who wrote the script with Takamasa Oe) has greatly expanded on the story’s central dynamic, which turns on a sexist widowed actor and the much-younger female driver who motors him around in his cherished Saab. “Drive My Car” is primarily based on a thin, blunt short story by Haruki Murakami. Sometimes, he makes suggestions for the stories, a continuation of the erotic-aesthetic bond between them. The next day, though, she often forgets the story and needs him to remind her of what she said. After they make love, Oto likes to tell Yusuke stories that have come to her at the moment of climax, narrating them to him as if she were in a trance. Their sexual life is fulfilling, too, and informs her fiction writing in surprising ways. Demonstrably affectionate and mutually supportive, the couple have wrapped themselves in a tender cocoon of warmth, desire and creative labor.
When the movie opens, Yusuke is cozily settled in with his wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), a television writer. Many movies offer pat life lessons this one speaks about what it means to go on living.
He continues working and working, specifically on a production of “Uncle Vanya” that reminds you that life is truly brilliant at imitating art. (Another of his movies, “ Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy,” opened earlier this year - he’s someone to pay attention to.) Its protagonist, Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima, a low-key heartbreaker), is an actor and theater director who endures a great loss not long after the story opens. Here, though, the direct address has a shock of empathy, the kind you feel at the precise moment when the thin veil separating us from other people falls and you see, really see, their humanity.Ī quiet masterpiece from the Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi, “Drive My Car” is a story about grief, love and work as well as the soul-sustaining, life-shaping power of art. When characters break the fourth wall, the effect can be comic or alienating or conspiratorial. But the camera just holds on this guy, forcing you to look at him and hear him out.
He’s in the dimly lit back seat of a car, his eyes shining with emotion, and talking to someone you care about greatly. Partway through “Drive My Car,” a character you don’t especially like or trust looks directly at the camera.