When he was preparing to star in “Uncle Vanya” before Oto’s death, she recorded for him the entire play minus his character’s lines on a cassette tape so that he could practice delivering them as he drove. Not only is Yusuke deeply attached to his car, for unspecified and ostensibly sentimental reasons he’s deeply attached to driving it, because doing so is an essential part of his own artistic process. There’s something about the car, a red Saab 900, that stands out: its steering wheel is on the left-which is unusual in Japan because driving there is done on the left side of the road. The credits feature Yusuke at the wheel of his beloved car, driving from Tokyo to Hiroshima, to begin the project that makes up the core of the movie’s action. Two years later, he’s invited to direct a production of “Uncle Vanya,” the play he was starring in when she died, at an arts festival in Hiroshima. (He sneaks out silently without interrupting the lovers.) Then, on the very day that Oto is preparing Yusuke for a serious talk about their relationship, she dies, suddenly, of a cerebral hemorrhage. In any case, a complication arises when Yusuke, returning home unexpectedly one day, finds her in bed with another man. She then fleshes the stories out, but if she’s stuck on a detail she leaves it to be completed in another sexual brainstorm. Oto has a peculiar creative process: she tells stories while she and Yusuke have sex, and the next morning Yusuke recites them back to her.
DRIVE MY CAR MOVIE TV
The story begins with a fortysomething married couple at home in Tokyo, a TV screenwriter named Oto (Reika Kirishima) and her husband, Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), an actor and stage director. It’s one of the great movies about the continuity of art and life, about the back-and-forth flow between personal relationships and artistic achievements-and about the artifices and agonized secrets on which both depend.
DRIVE MY CAR MOVIE MOVIE
“Drive My Car,” based on a story by Haruki Murakami, is a movie about artists and their many forms of collaboration-cursed and blessed, inescapable and ill-chosen, behind the scenes and on public display, affably professional and ineffably intimate. It’s a long setup, and it might have been exasperating if not for Hamaguchi’s suave sense of melancholic style, marked by a luminous yet cold fluidity, like a limpid stream of water that stings. The credits don’t turn up until about forty minutes into the movie, which runs a minute shy of three hours they mark the border between prelude and action. When credits are placed unconventionally in movies, it’s usually a matter of flashy style, but in Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s new film, “Drive My Car,” opening on Wednesday, it’s a matter of dramatic substance.
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