‘We must keep on living...’
The surprising success of Parasite at the 2019 Oscars has happily encouraged more people to ‘overcome the one inch tall barrier of subtitles’ (according to Parasite director Bong Joon Ho) that comes with the territory when viewing foreign cinema. This has perhaps opened the door for something a little stranger and a little more esoteric. Parasite was hardly a crowd pleaser, but it was an entertaining film with a unique idea at its core. Drive My Car is a different matter entirely…
Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a staid but successful actor. Following the death of his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), Yūsuke finds himself directing a multilingual production of Chekhov’s famously difficult play Uncle Vanya. In the lead role, Yūsuke casts young actor Kōji Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), a man who was having an affair with Oto before she died. And so, the game begins.
Despite the fact that I am an English Literature graduate and a Film Studies teacher, I didn’t really understand this film on the many frequencies from which it was broadcasting. I understood it on a human level (I think…), but all the play within the film stuff was hard going. I know about the concept of Chekhov’s gun (if a gun is shown in the first act then it must be fired by the third), but I know nothing of his plays – Philistine that I am. This makes Drive My Car a film that the audience has to work at. Now, that is no bad thing, I forced myself to keep listening to Radiohead’s ambient masterpiece Kid A until it finally turned from a dirge like caterpillar into a beautiful electronic butterfly, but with this film, I’m not sure the work is worth the pay off.
Drive My Car is a wonderfully acted film, directed with sophistication and aplomb, there are long scenes of dialogue here that feel both epic in terms of their implications but also incredibly intimate. And yet… I’m really not convinced that this is a film that is worth three hours of anyone’s time.
In the end, this is a curious movie that I’m glad to have watched, but it’s not one that I will be returning to again.