Vanya in Hiroshima: “Drive My Car” (2021)

I don’t know that there has been a film quite this moving in some time. Anytime you bring together themes of loss, suppressed emotion, forgiveness, and perseverance folded into “Uncle Vanya” or rather Chekhov folded into all this, I am yours.

The structure of the film is a quiet, enigmatic set-up of a man and woman in bed, making love as she tells the tale of a high school girl who enters the house of her crush after he and his family have gone for the day. This may be the first of a series of thematic foreshadowings, but it’s also her way of composing a script. She, Oto, is a screenwriter and her husband Yusuke Kafuku is a theater director and actor. This is one of those sequences in cinema where you feel as though you are eavesdropping or privy to something so intimate. Not just a couple sharing space and love, but the act of creation. This sounds heavy-handed, but trust me, it’s not.

“Drive My Car” is a film replete with subtleties, narrative, thematic, and performative and at three hours, not a moment is too much. Indeed, at movie’s end, I wanted more. 

Oto’s heroine discovers that in her previous life, she had been a lamprey eel that refused to be a parasite and live off other fish. Accordingly, she affixed herself to a rock and steadily wasted away. She feels drawn to Yamaga, her crush (for lack of a better term), and feels the same way. She takes something insignificant but leaves behind something of herself. In Yamaga’s room, she feels the same as she did as a lamprey and past and present fall away. 

She masturbates at one point and is driven to tears that fall on Yamaga’s pillow and decides that these tears will be her “token” for the day. She falls asleep and wakes to find it dark. She hears footsteps coming up the stairs. Who could it be? Yamaga? His mother or father? She is relieved because then the truth will be revealed and she will be a new person. 

The following morning, at his desk, Yusuke is watching a documentary about lampreys.

They discuss the story in the car as Yusuke drops Oto off at the studio. They discuss refinement of the tale and we learn that Yusuke has a festival to attend in Vladivostok. He travels to Narita to catch the flight which is then cancelled and drives back home to discover Oto in bed with a notorious young actor. Yusuke says nothing and retreats and returns to Narita, where he talks later at night with Oto as she asks him if he’s sampled any of the local Vladivostokian delicacies. 

The teleplay is only the first tale within the tale that is woven into a rich, narrative tapestry. For reasons that will become clear, Yusuke passes the time listening to Oto recite dialog from Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” as he replies in the role of Vanya. This recitation is the anchor of the film and sets up a dialog between the characters in the film and their theatrical predecessors, between director-writer Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and Chekhov, and between us, the audience, the players in the film, and Chekhov and his text. One suspects this should also include Haruki Murakami who wrote the short story the film is based on. 

The next day, he is sideswiped by a car and he and at the doctor’s, discovers he has glaucoma in the left eye that will only grow worse but can be slowed down with drops.

Later, he tells Oto that he is going to conduct a workshop that she doesn’t recall him mentioning and implores him to come home afterward, that she has something to tell him. There is an urgency or perhaps better, a forcefulness, in her words. Yusuke agrees and after taking off, simply drives around, listening to Oto’s reading of “Vanya” as he responds. This sequence ends with Sonya’s soliloquy on infidelity. Yusuke returns later in the evening to find Oto dead, on the floor, from a cerebral hemorrhage. 

The final scene of this act is the funeral where Yusuke sees Oto’s lover, Koshi Takatsuki. They make eye contact. Takatsuki bows.

In forty minutes, Hamaguchi has already delivered an onion’s worth of skin. The credits role over a scene of Yusuke driving. We are told it’s two years later, and he is on his way to Hiroshima to mount a multilingual performance of “Vanya”. 

Once in Hiroshima, he is told that he will have a driver - not because word leaked about his glaucoma - but because a few years prior, one of the attendees ran over someone! Better safe than sorry, then. Yusuke is reluctant to surrender the wheel. In many ways, the car is his life; it is an extension of his mind and memory, it is where he thinks, and thus, works and live. In any case, he is presented with Misaki Watari, who impresses with her professionalism and impassive face. 

Misaki doesn’t seem to be affected by very much and at 23, carries something deep in her eyes (a huge credit to Toko Miura in a staggeringly quiet performance). This will, like so many other aspects of the story, come out at slowly but with emphasis. 

I should add here that the actors deliver, repeatedly. The performances are unique but each one serves the overall structure of the film, the principals revealing the most dimensions, but even the supporting cast bring profound lyrical nuance to what come across as fully formed individuals (when they could just as readily be accorded mere “symbol” status). 

Hidetoshi Nishijima as Yusuke is a well of sadness and tragedy, but something else, too. His change after Oto’s death is not histrionic nor visibly brooding, but you sense her loss throughout. Reika Kirishima as Oto packs so much into her scenes and so early on that she stays present even when not referred to at other junctures. As Koshi Takatsuki, Masaki Okada infuses a potentially one-note figure with a sonata’s worth. 

Speaking of Takatsuki, he shows up at rehearsals. He tells Yusuke that he’s been dropped by his agent and we soon learn that he very much wants to be part of this performance as a way of connecting with Oto and partly to redeem and/or legitimize himself. There is no drama between Yusuke and Takatsuki, but it is plain that Yusuke despises the younger man. And yet, when he gives Yusuke the lead role of Uncle Vanya, I asked myself if it was because he was setting up Takatsuki to fail because he is - on the surface, at least - so ill-suited for it or was he genuinely impressed by Takatsuki’s work? That said, over the course of rehearsals, the young actor delivers.

Sadly, he lives up to his reputation as being unable to control his impulses and we see him with Janice Chang, the Taiwanese actress playing Yelena in the morning one day before rehearsal (to which they are both late). On this, Yusuke drives home Takatsuki’s frailty of which he seems to be aware. 

As the two men grow closer, both owing to each of their relationships with Oto as well as “Vanya”, we sense a growing respect of the older man for the younger, and we learn something more of what Oto and Takatsuki shared. She told him the end of the story. 

It was a burglar who came into Yamaga’s family’s house and our heroine winds up killing him as he attempts to rape her. She stabs him in the left eye. He goes limp, she leaves him, fleeing the house.

She waits out the repercussions, wondering how this would change Yamaga, and perhaps even, her relationship to him. As it is, she sees him at school and he seems to be the same. Still happy-go-lucky, just the same. Did she imagine it all? Did it really happen? She must have? But she can’t be sure. She elects to return to Yamaga’s house and sees a surveillance camera. She acts naturally and moves on but the cameras send the message that yes, it did happen. It changed everything forever and she did, in fact, kill a man. She wants to tell them, she wants to enter the house, but cannot: the hidden key that she found under a pot is no longer there. She looks at the camera and understands: “I killed him.”

Takatsuki reveals this all to Yusuke in the back of Yusuke’s Saab as Watari drives them around. Takatsuki is seated on Yusuke’s left, thus in Yusuke’s “blind spot”. By now, Yusuke has also told Takatsuki (and Watari) that he and Oto had a lost a child, a daughter, at age four. She would have been 23, Watari’s age, and this marked the “end of happy times.” Oto quit acting and grew lethargic. Yusuke left TV and returned to the theater and soon enough, Oto began telling stories. She would create them after having sex; the stories became the bond that helped them overcome their loss.

Along with that, though, Oto began seeing other men. She created more stories and each affair would end with the completion of each story. 

Returning to this last conversation between Takatsuki and Yusuke, it is Takatsuki who shows depth and insight when he says that we must look into our hearts and question ourselves. Do we really know others, even those closet to us?

Prior to this scene, the reason they were driving Takatsuki at all is because his car was in the shop. After rehearsal, as Yusuke is still inside the theater, Watari goes to pay for parking, and Takatsuki chases after a photographer (he is, after all, a well-known actor but has a hair trigger temper when it comes to having his photo taken; this is the second affront in the film). Once all three are back in the car, Takatsuki shrugs off his appearance. However, let’s pause here and reflect on “Chekhov’s gun.” Okay, we’re done.

The next day is a dress rehearsal and after the gun in Vanya goes off, it’s not long before two police detectives show up to arrest Takatsuki for the beating of the photographer that resulted in death. It leaves the future of the play up in the air because, despite Yusuke’s full knowledge of the lines, the play, he is reluctant to play Vanya again. 

Let’s backtrack a little. By this point, Watari and Yusuke have developed a bond from being invited to his Korean handle Kon Yoon-su’s (a stellar Jin Dae-yeon in his first role) house for dinner where we learn that his wife is Lee Yoon-a, the deaf actress who plays Sonya. Prior to that, Yusuke had invited Watari to rehearsals, but she demurred. However, she attends the outdoor reading where Lee and Jessica play out the reconciliation scene in “Vanya” (which is incredibly touching, as much of the tenderer moments in “Vanya” and in this movie are) and this alone deepens their relationship.

Along the way, we find that Misaki lost her mother in a landslide in her home village, that her mother worked in a nightclub and was responsible for Watari’s driving skills: Misaki dropped her mother off at work and picked her up. Additionally, her mother was somewhat controlling and abusive, but later, we will find out more about other aspects of her personality. 

Misaki is recalcitrant to discuss much in detail about Yusuke’s work, but she is direct regarding that which she does talk about. She nails Takatsuki for being a liar at one point and shows an aversion to compliments (as when at Yoon-su and Yoon-a’s house, she ducks down - literally ducking kind words - to play with the family dog. 

Kufuku had asked Watari to go for a drive at one point to take him to some place in Hiroshima that she liked to go. They go to a recycling plant; we learn that Watari’s first job in Hiroshima when she left her village, was driving a garbage truck. We learn, too, that she never met her father, but not whether he specifically abandoned Misaki and her mother or if she was the result of a dalliance.

“Driving is the only thing I know how to do.” This makes Misaki Watari in some ways, a counterpart to Yusuke even more; for both, the vehicle is an extension of the self. They - not really joke - ruminate on Yusuke’s given name “Kufuku” (which in pronunciation sounds not a little like “Kafka” - perhaps a conceit on Murakami’s part?); it is a pairing of “house” and “good luck.” Oto’s name translates as “gospel”.

After Takatsuki’s arrest, Yoon-su and the other organizer/representative (producer for the play remark that they wonder how the performance will go on, that Yusuke will have to play Vanya or it will be cancelled. Yusuke is first heartily dismissive that they would even bring that up after being aware of the loss of life at their former lead’s hands. Then he simply refuses to play Vanya, a role he is well known for. After a moment, they agree to give it a couple of days before anything decisive.

Why, though, is Yusuke so reluctant to play Vanya? Because “Chekhov is terrifying” as he tells Takatsuki when the younger man asked Yusuke the same question. Yusuke’s advice to Takatsuki was to “yield yourself to the text.” If anything bears out the possible, real-life application of Derrida’s “nothing exists outside the text”, it might well be this entire film. The centrality of a text in drama is not merely the words on the page, but the way the writer’s words come alive in the birthing of the performance.

In the case of a genius like Chekhov, those words demand fulfillment, sometimes beyond what an actor has experienced or beyond his depths. The amount of energy an artist like Chekhov draws from a performer (and for that matter, the director) is immense. I think of Bergman’s echoes of Strindberg or Ibsen, either overtly or implicitly, in his film work and the performances that inform those works and what they demanded of all concerned, and it is surely palpable. Talking to actors in my life are likewise supportive of what Hamaguchi and his collaborators here are presenting.

So much in “Drive My Car” is revealed by small actions and few words. In some cases, Chekhov does most of the talking, as is fitting for a troupe of actors and a tale that circles back to what is both necessary in art and why art is necessary in itself. Even more comes to fruition in the last act of the film when Yusuke asks Watari to just drive and settles on going to her village. The drive is a full day’s journey and Watari refuses Yusuke’s suggestion/request that they drive in shifts; she will drive straight through and sleep on the ferry over.

Watari mentions in passing that Yusuke’s Saab is “cared for”; it seems to carry several levels with it. Not that it was the only thing Yusuke cared for, but that he cared deeply for the car; sure, it was/is an extension of his self, his life and is cared for in that way. But aside from that sense of self-preservation, it is something he cares about, something he nurtures. If he and Oto were struck with tragedy by the loss of their child, then if the teleplays were her way of coping with the loss and if the production, directing, or performing in a play was Yusuke’s, can we take the automobile as another aspect of Yusuke’s caring for or nurturing of one last connection with Oto?

En route, little is said between them, and on the ferry, we learn that Taktsuki’s assault has made the news as Misaki sleeps. The land is snow covered and Watari isn’t sure if they’ll be able to find her house. They do, though, and she has brought flowers to leave in the snow that she casts downhill toward the snow-covered collapsed house. 

Watari states simply “I killed my mother.” She doesn’t know why she didn’t go back to save her as the house fell in on her. She got in the car and simply drove away. Her mother, she said, had another personality that emerged when Watari was younger, named “Sachi”, who was kind toward Misaki where her mother was brutal. She and Sachi became friends and while she wasn’t sure if her mother was play-acting or if this was disassociative personality disorder, her words indicate that this came from a heartfelt place, perhaps the only way she could show her daughter any affection: “the last beautiful thing in my mother was condensed in Sachi.”

Just so, Yusuke had been plagued with wondering why he didn’t return earlier to Oto on that day when she so ardently said she had to talk to him. He wondered if she was going to leave him, which he could not endure, or would it have saved her life? Why had he not heard her out during all those years of silently accepted infidelity? Takatsuki raised the question earlier? Why didn’t he discuss this with her? He admits to Watari that he was hurt, he was angry. “I didn’t allow myself to be hurt properly.”

“I killed my wife” does not land with the same impact; it might be the only line in the film that doesn’t quite ring true, but it isn’t uttered as a way of attempting to raise the bar of tragedy; it plays more as a symmetrical or antiphonal response. Throughout, we experience splits/fissures and the dualities implicit in acting and what is revealed over time, both in theater, in texts, and in lived experience. Not knowing what we may never know, but continuing on with what knowledge we do have and if not coming to terms with what we cannot know, we persevere nonetheless. 

It is Misaki, in echoes of Chekhov’s admonition (via Sonya to Vanya) to continue on, who says, “we must  keep on living….”, “It’ll be okay. We’ll be okay.”

The show does go on with Yusuke as Vanya and in the film’s closing scene, we see Misaki Watari with a dog in the red Saab at the grocery market getting in and driving onto the next thing in life. We see the merest of smiles on her face. Or did I merely imagine that?