Aside from the most epic, this film got the lowkey-ish attention but screamed utmost perfection.
‘Drive my Car’, which has been adapted for the screen from a short story of the same name by Haruki Murakami is about the story of tracking the roads of two individuals—the rider and one chauffeur. This is an epic drama film co-written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi.
Language and Style
While many of Japanese literary fans can argue that the film heavily relies on Haruki Murakami’s doing, the director still provided the best to stand on its own spine. One of its languages and context was interpreted in Anton Chekov’s “Uncle Vanya”. The play’s titular character is Kafuku’s signature role as an actor, and most of the film focusses on a production he’s been brought to Hiroshima to direct, two years after his wife’s death. It’s a play he literally knows by heart—not just his role, but those of every character. While being driven the hour to and from the theatre every day, Kafuku listens to a tape of the play, recorded for him by his late wife, Oto (Reika Kirishima), in which Vanya’s lines are left out; he supplies them from the back seat. This preparation is part of the Kafuku method. “The flow of the entire play,” he explains to his driver, Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), “has to be memorized.”
Later on, Director Hamaguchi realized the power and impact of those words based from Chekov.
Hamaguchi’s simple composition is slow-paced. Yet, this slow pace is not without function. It allows him to translate moments in mundane visual poetry and that’s what makes it freaking good to deal with. It does not only reveal the mundane poetry of enunciating signifiers, the erotic flavor of our utterances – an erotism hiding in the rhythm of one’s speech as well as in the signified of the chosen signifiers, but also the impact of the unsaid, the deceptive nature of our own ego – a flight into blindness, and that what speaks through signifiers but remains unheard.
The film’s cinematography
Beyond the storytelling, the production also paid careful attention to the film’s cinematography. Director of Photography Hidetoshi Shinomiya and Lighting Director Daiki Takai JSL took the challenge of transforming this multi-layered narrative into purposefully captured images with the aid of ARRI’s ALEXA Mini, Ultra Prime lenses, and M-Series lights.
At the beginning of the film, when Oto was telling her story, you could only see a silhouette of her naked figure but not her face. This detail was deliberate to give the audience a sense of enigma and room to imagine who the character was and what she could be hiding behind her voice. The dialogue and images constantly contradicted one another, which was the director’s theme throughout the film. To add more to the mystery, Shinomiya opted to shoot in cooler blue tones, taking inspiration from the films of Portuguese cinematographer Eduardo Serra and French director Claude Chabrol.
As you can see throughout the movie, they did not make complicated shooting style and colors because their goal was to make it look so simple.
“Our goal was to reflect what the characters were genuinely feeling at that moment.” explains Shinomiya.
With a lot of car scenes and roads on the go, they made sure that it explores and versatility and fun even if their space was very complex.
“Every part of it was intricately designed to give the audience time to think and be curious about what was going on inside the car before anything was revealed.” Shinomiya added.
CONCLUSION
Hamaguchi’s ‘Drive My Car’ in short, is a meditative and intimate masterpiece. It is a narrative unlike any other. With an exquisitely layered but challenging intertextuality, the director elegantly underlines the ease by which a subject deceives himself – hides within his safe deceptive ego, how destructive one’s deafness for the other’s subjectivity and desire can be.
It is also an epitome of using simple keys to bring masterpiece yet being understood by the eyes and the ears of the many.
Despite the challenges of a limited budget, ‘Drive My Car’ has gone on to get hundreds of awards and nominations, proving that the formula for a successful film can be as simple as a great story, a dedicated team, and reliable equipment.
“Drive My Car” is currently streaming on HBO Max.
