Drive My Car

Directed by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi

Running time: 2hr59 | REVIEWED BY CATHERINE BRAY

Drive My Car starring Hidetoshi Nishijima

It would be eminently possible to have made a terrible film out of Haruki Murakami’s short story Drive My Car, which opens with a tight ten on the difference between male and female drivers, as seen by our protagonist Kafuku. (Apparently men can converse normally even while focussed on the road, while with women, there’s always a tension there.) In adapting the material for the big screen, Ryusuke Hamaguchi and co-writer Takamasa Oe swerve right around such obvious wrong turnings as having their lead, Hidetoshi Nishijima, externalise too much of this kind of thing. 

Having characters externalise thoughts that they would in fact keep to themselves is one of the commonest pitfalls in literary adaptation; famously, the other is trying to slavishly cram everything from a long novel into a truncated runtime. Drive My Car is unusual with respect to this second truism — covering a short story at a runtime of three hours arguably extends the narrative of the source material, allowing it all the room to breathe and stretch and expand that you could possibly want, given there is not all that much to cover: a troubled marriage, a taciturn driver, rehearsals for a play are the major beats. 

So why this generous, open approach? I think there’s something very smart indeed at work here. The key space in the film is the car, which is where the key conversations take place. A car in motion is a transitional space — we’re in a car because we’re on a journey; we haven’t arrived yet. We are effectively, in limbo. This limbo state seems to me to be what the film is interested in exploring. People can get stuck in limbo, doomed to a kind a half-life of repeated cycles, for all sorts of reasons, and I won’t spoil why that might be the case for the different characters here. The triumph of this extraordinary film is that it evokes this limbo half-life without itself feeling like purgatory, instead allowing us to gently observe without judgment and come away enriched.

DRIVE MY CAR (DORAIBU MAI KÂ) (2021) Written by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Takamasa Oe | Shot by Hidetoshi Shinomiya | Edited by Azusa Yamazaki

Selected for the Competition at the 74th Cannes Film Festival