Things are complicated by a devastating event in Oto’s life, and Yûsuke being confronted with proof that she had been having an affair with a handsome and disreputable young actor and celebrity called Kôji (Masaki Okada). The couple learn that Yûsuke is in danger of losing the sight in one eye – he later learns with a shock that this has changed the short story that she was working on – but this perhaps makes it easier for him to accept that he will need a driver for his trusty Saab 900 when he later directs a new revival of his Vanya production at an arts festival in Hiroshima, a city that is photographed with crisp unsentimentality. He has a complex relationship with his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), a successful writer and TV dramatist who has a habit of murmuring aloud ideas for erotic short stories, trance-like, while she is astride Yûsuke having sex, including a potent vignette about a teenage girl who breaks into the house of the boy with whom she is obsessed.
Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a successful actor and theatre director who specialises in experimental multilingual productions with surtitles – he is currently working on Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and is preparing to play the lead in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. It is a film about the link between confession, creativity and sexuality and the unending mystery of other people’s lives and secrets.
Drive My Car is about all this and more where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur. Hamaguchi’s previous pictures Asako I and II and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy were about the enigma of identity, the theatrical role play involved in all social interaction and the erotic rapture of intimacy. R yûsuke Hamaguchi’s mysterious and beautiful new film is inspired by Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name – and that title, like Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, is designed to tease us with the shiny wistfulness of a Beatles lyric.
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