Hamaguchi’s film follows a theatre director who teaches actors to empty themselves of feeling so the text can speak. What Drive My Car cannot see is that its protagonist has been applying this method to his own grief for two years and calling it discipline.
CASSETTE TAPE — SIDE A [recorded, date unknown. Label in Oto’s handwriting: Uncle Vanya / Kafuku’s part]
OTO: You say that so simply: “keep the faith.” But how? How does a man like me keep faith?
KAFUKU: —
OTO: Your cue.
KAFUKU: [from script] By not speaking of it. By doing what needs to be done. By—
OTO: No. Don’t act it. Just say the words.
KAFUKU: [pause] By not speaking of it.
OTO: Better. Again.
KAFUKU: By not speaking of it.
SIDE B [recorded, date unknown. Label: same, Oto’s handwriting]
OTO: You say that so simply: “keep the faith.” But how? How does a man like me keep faith?
[3 hours, 42 minutes of driving. Highway sounds. Kafuku’s responses, where required, from memory.]
[SIDE B was recorded after her death. The voice on Side A did not know it would become Side B.]
| Director | Ryûsuke Hamaguchi |
|---|---|
| Year | 2021 |
| Runtime | 179 minutes |
| Cast | Hidetoshi Nishijima, Tôko Miura, Masaki Okada, Reika Kirishima |
| Awards | Academy Award, Best International Feature Film; Palme d’Or nomination; four awards including Best Screenplay, Cannes Film Festival |
| Streaming | Available on major platforms |
The Tár review argued that giving a woman the organizing consciousness of a male artist also gives the audience the pleasure of watching her lose it — that the film cannot be innocent of its enjoyment of the fall it has arranged. The male artists in this archive are protected from equivalent falls: Sandy Bates celebrated, Guido granted his fantasy, Samet diminished but not destroyed. Drive My Car is the first film in the archive that gives its male artist no such protection, and it does so not by giving him a public reckoning but by giving him a dead wife and two years of driving in circles around what he cannot face.
Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a theatre director who has spent his career developing a rehearsal method: actors read their parts without interpretation, without emotion, without performing. They let the words settle into the body through repetition until the text can speak for itself without the actor’s ego interfering. It is a method for getting out of your own way. He teaches it to his casts with the patience of someone who has thought about almost nothing else. He cannot apply it to his grief, which means he has been in his own way for two years without knowing it, running lines in a red Saab on Japanese highways with the voice of his dead wife on a cassette tape, performing the absence of grief so consistently that the performance has become invisible to him.
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s film, adapted from Haruki Murakami’s short story and expanded to three hours with a forty-minute prologue before the title appears, follows Kafuku to Hiroshima for a two-month residency staging Uncle Vanya — a multilingual production, each actor speaking their own language, no translation, the meaning carried across the gaps. He is assigned a driver, Misaki (Tôko Miura), a young woman with her own buried damage, who takes him to and from rehearsals each day in his red Saab while the cassette plays. She says almost nothing. He runs his lines against his dead wife’s voice. The car becomes the film’s real setting: a sealed space where the method cannot protect him.
The Chekhov is not incidental. Uncle Vanya concerns a man who has wasted his life serving a great man who turned out not to be great, and who cannot stop wasting it because stopping would require him to look directly at what has been lost. Vanya has spent decades in service to an illusion. Kafuku has spent two years in service to a grief he has aestheticized into a rehearsal practice. The text he has chosen to stage is the text most precisely about his condition, and he has chosen it without appearing to notice this. Hamaguchi notices.
Watch the early rehearsals in Hiroshima. Kafuku sits at the head of the table. The actors — Korean, Japanese, Taiwanese, deaf — read their parts flatly, mechanically, without feeling. He listens with absolute attention. He is most alive in these sequences: absorbed, precise, genuinely present in a way he is not in any other context. The method works because it requires him to be wholly exterior, wholly focused on what the text is doing in other people’s mouths. The only place Kafuku cannot apply the method is in the Saab, where the text is his wife’s voice and the part he is running is his own life.
Kafuku’s method asks actors to stop performing feeling so the real feeling can emerge. He has been performing the absence of grief so long he has mistaken the performance for recovery.
The actor Koshi Takatsuki (Masaki Okada) arrives in the production carrying his own unprocessed relationship to Oto — she told him stories, she used him the way she used people, she was not what Kafuku believed her to be and perhaps not what Takatsuki believed either. The two men orbit each other through rehearsals with the careful wariness of people who know they are looking at the same wound from different angles. Kafuku casts him in the role of Vanya. The choice is not innocent, and the film is not innocent about the choice: putting Takatsuki in the role of the man who wasted his life in service to an illusion is Kafuku directing his own grief at one remove, making Takatsuki perform what he cannot perform himself.
The method, finally, failing: a scene at night, in a car park in Hiroshima, where everything Kafuku has been not-speaking-of surfaces. Hamaguchi gives this scene enormous space. Nishijima does almost nothing. The camera holds. What emerges is not catharsis in any conventional sense — it is more like the moment when a performance finally fails and the thing underneath is briefly, unwillingly visible. Kafuku has been running the same passage for two years. He has finally heard it.
The film in this archive that creates the sharpest friction is our review of Perfect Days, Wim Wenders’s portrait of Hirayama, the Tokyo toilet cleaner whose daily routine raises the question this archive has been asking since: is this precision spiritual practice or protective system? Hirayama’s routine is impenetrable — we never learn what it is guarding against, and the film may not know. Kafuku’s routine is equally precise and fully legible: we know exactly what the cassette is, exactly what the driving is, exactly what the method is for. Hamaguchi gives us the transparency that Wenders withholds. The difference reveals what each film believes about whether the viewer needs to know. Wenders trusts the practice without explaining it. Hamaguchi insists on the explanation because the explanation is also the diagnosis. Both positions are honest. Only one of them allows its protagonist to be genuinely healed, by which I mean genuinely damaged first.
Misaki drives him back from Hiroshima at the film’s end, through the night, through the tunnel, north toward her own buried place. The cassette is still in the deck. At some point — the film does not show us exactly when — it will be played again or it will not. The red Saab will be in Hokkaido. The voice on Side A will speak its lines. The silence on Side B will wait for a response that arrives, now, from a slightly different place than it did before. This is not recovery. It is something more precise and less comfortable: the first rehearsal where Kafuku has finally stopped acting.
If this stayed with you, watch these next:
Perfect Days (Wenders, 2023): reviewed here; the routine that may be spiritual practice or protective armour, but where Wenders refuses the diagnosis Hamaguchi insists on — and where the contrast reveals what each director believes the audience needs to know about the man inside the method.
Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy (Hamaguchi, 2021): three short films made the same year, each about a moment of misrecognition and what it opens — Hamaguchi at his most concentrated, where the language and the silence between people carry the same weight as in Drive My Car but compressed to breaking point.