Grief is a universal human experience, transcending all social, cultural, and linguistic boundaries. It is a powerful emotion, deeply rooted in the human psyche. The mind can almost turn on itself while grappling with the idea of loss. The father of psychoanalysis, Sigmund Freud was known to say, “We are never so defenseless against suffering as when we love.”
The ancient Greeks had the concept of catharsis- the release of pent-up emotions through art as a central element of their dramatic performances.
In Drive My Car, we find this timeless tradition beautifully reimagined in the context of modern cinema. Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s three-hour masterwork is a personal odyssey of mourning and artistic creation which, by its inherent nature, strangles and suffocates us inside a red Saab 900. It is used as a shared space for emotional reconciliation for the two main characters.
At the beginning of the film, we are introduced to a stage adaptation of Samuel Beckett’s, Waiting for Godot. It sets into play the existential qualms that trouble the two leads, thereby, unfolding to the audience a tale of the differences in labor, with grief as a primary driving force.
At the heart of Hamaguchi’s film lies the grief of the protagonist, Yusuke Kafuku, a renowned stage actor. The loss of his wife, Oto, forty minutes into the movie, sets the stage for the exploration of profound sorrow and emotional turmoil. Through art, Kafuku finds a means to navigate the labyrinthine depths of his grief. As Kafuku embarks on the journey of directing a multilingual production of Anton Chekhov‘s Uncle Vanya, we witness the transformative power of art as a conduit for grief. Chekhov’s work, much like Becketts’, is renowned for its exploration of the human condition, and his characters grapple with existential questions, longing, and unfulfilled dreams. Chekhov, another master of ennui, described the film by Kafuku as having words that bring out the real you; an actor’s worst nightmare.
Similar to Chekhov, Hamaguchi bases the majority of the drama and suspense in the movie on character interactions, allowing the characters to drive the narrative through their emotional arcs. The brilliance is showcased through emotional performances rather than plot or place settings.
Chekhov’s words in the play mask and mirror the protagonist’s dilemma in more ways than one. As Kafuku rehearses the lines of the play “That woman does not deserve forgiveness for her infidelity”, the words lend themselves to his situation. Yusuke has yet not been able to come to terms with the fact that his wife had been cheating on him since the loss of their daughter many years ago and added to that was his inability to articulate his grief on her passing. He borrows from art as his senses fail to sustain him.
Just as grief transcends language, so does art. Communication (or the lack thereof) is a major thematic throughline across almost every scene in Drive My Car. The film strips down the ability to communicate to its very essentials. This is done through the multilingual aspect of the play that Kafuku is bringing to life. The cast for the play doesn’t share a common language, with one of them only communicating through Korean Sign Language. They have to grab onto each other’s speech patterns, get a feel of the body language of the other, and listen to set the rhythm of the play and bring a scene to life.
Hamaguchi employs a lot of restraint. The world tells us that there is a should with every emotion that we can feel. We internalize an idea that we have learnt from outside of ourselves and it conditions us to behave a certain type of way. The truth, however, is that there isn’t a should to everything. Some things don’t have right or wrong ways to be. Some things just happen to be outside our control and we often don’t possess a justifiable response, a how-to-be guide when some things affect us. We become a conduit. An illicit reaction is strangled out of us.
As humans, we perpetually live in regret. Regret carves us hollow. Every moment of bereavement for the person that you could be, the life that you could lead hits with a new blow- it’s like an endless line of Matryoshka dolls (Matryoshka dolls, also known as stacking dolls or Russian tea dolls, are a set of wooden dolls of decreasing size placed one inside another). Hamaguchi takes this entire idea of a ride in his Saab and takes a step towards healing and reconciliation with the self. The nuanced non-linear portrayal of grief in the film cements itself within a complex yet real idea of what it is like to love and lose in a 21st-century context.
Drive My Car has some brilliant performances by Hidetoshi Nishijima as Yusuke Kafuku and Toko Miura as Misaki Watarias as well as the stunning backdrop of the Beatles’ song Drive My Car. It won the Best Non-English Language Film at the Golden Globes, an award whose last two winners were Minari’s Lee Isaac Chung and Parasite’s Bong Joon Ho.