Drive My Car

Schrödinger's Guilt; Chekhov's Gun

or

Uncle Vanya on Ground Zero

 

I've seen so many movies recently about multi-verses and meta-verses (and there's a google-verse coming to your "superposition-plex" including Dr. Strange in The Multiverse of Madness, The Flash: Flashpoint, Spider-Man: Across the Spider-verse—Part One* and Everything Everywhere All at Once) you'd think it was a new concept rather than originating in Ancient Greece by the philosopher Chrysippus**—at least in THIS dimension, anyway.

 

With all those multi-plex movies about multi-verses, it's going to crowd out worthy little films that don't have people in spandex in them. Movies like the one out of Japan, Drive My Car—or Doraibu mai kâ, or ドライブ・マイ・カー, which will probably win all sorts of awards this season, and is, in its normal, every-day way, about how our own lives can be meta-verses, without a single anomaly in the space-time continuum. Or any sort of involvement with Mark Zuckerberg.

 

All good things.

Oto Kafuku (Reika Kirishima) wakes up one night and, in the pre-dawn light, tells her drowsing husband Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) a vivid story about a girl obsessed with a boy, who, noticing that no one is there during the day, sneaks into the boy's family's house—just to be there and to be a part of his world. She keeps doing it, every time taking some common object—like a pencil, a paper-clip, and leaving something of her own hidden in a drawer as a token of her visit. "They are gradually mingling in their exchange of tokens," she says. Her descriptions are vivid, based on feelings and sensations. His comments are practical, finding faults or attitudes that are weak in the story.

It turns out he's an actor. An actor and director, who specializes in multi-lingual presentations—the actors speaking in their native languages. She's a former actor, now a writer, developing a series. The two collaborate incessantly—he is her sounding board for ideas (which come to her in a unique manner) and she helps him learn parts by recording responses on a cassette which he plays to while he's driving to appointments. One of those appointments is to play Uncle Vanya in a Russian production of Chekhov's play he's directing. The day he's to leave, he's alerted that it's canceled due to weather, and he decides to go home. When he arrives, he finds Oto having sex with a young actor working on her series. Yûsuke, having not been seen by them, chooses not to confront them, but backs out of his apartment and gets a hotel.

He calls later, pretending that he's in Russia—never mentioning to his wife what he'd seen—and a week later, drives to the airport to the engagement. But, he's hit broadside by another driver and taken to the hospital. Oto rushes to his side. It seems Yûsuke has glaucoma and is losing his vision. It can't be cured, but it can be slowed with eye-drops, which he dutifully takes. The car gets repaired. No questions are asked. And if Yûsuke has to go somewhere, Oto drives him. He plays Vanya, but the lines about fidelity are crushing to him and one night, he almost cannot finish the play. When he gets home, things are as normal, but as he leaves for work one day, Oto says "Tonight, can we talk?" But, he takes his time going home and when he enters their apartment, Oto is dead on the floor, of a cerebral hemorrhage.

There is still a part of this prelude to tell, but the credits haven't even happened yet—they show up at the 40 minute mark—and it's not even the main part of the nearly 3 hour movie. Yûsuke will be invited to Hiroshima to direct another production of "Vanya" but, for insurance purposes, he will not be allowed to drive. Against his preferences, he is assigned a rather stoic driver (Tôko Miura) who we will learn has also suffered a loss and the two must hesitantly navigate the terrains of grief they share.

That's the majority of the film. But that preamble sets up the level of detail and the sense that this is less about plot than it is about the layers of life. This is a dense, detailed film of which things are said and left unsaid, where the mysteries one contemplates are what somebody meant by the way they said something, the way one feels being more important than the intention, and the way the mind slips into "What if?" mode for no other reason than to torture oneself. It's as much of the mind as it is a display of interactions between people, reading between the lines of the script and becoming more like a book narrative. It also explores the trenches of survivor's guilt and the unseen country of what might have been, depending for much time on the evolution of Yûsuke's production of Chekhov and finding in it no answers, but it's own degree of dealing.

 

It's really a wonderful film, with the same intricacy of thought that I've found in some Japanese writing. That it transfers so well to the screen shouldn't surprise in its modest but intimate themes. And its going over the ground of the mind's different interpretations of truth, makes it a bit of a mystery film, even though there's no "who done it" involved, only the question of "why."

 

Be mindful of that three hours, though.

 

   

* Yeesh. I'm looking forward to it and all, but they should have got an editor just for the TITLE!!

 

** Or comics writer Gardner Fox—I always get the two confused.