Drive My Car
I watched this movie before TIFF, and then I got busy with my “coverage” of the festival, followed by a vacation. But the film left enough of an impression on me that I wanted to circle back and write down a few thoughts.
I opted to watch this rather lengthy movie one hour at a time, over three consecutive days. It’s an unfortunate fact of life that it’s rare for me to be able to spend 3 uninterrupted hours doing any one thing.
As it happens, Drive My Car works really well as a kind of miniseries with roughly one-hour episodes. The film’s pace is definitely slow, with plenty of quiet passages where characters travel in—you guessed it, a car—but it didn’t test my patience, partly because I was coming to it fresh every day. There’s also a clear three act structure to the story, which lines up nicely at the hour marks.
The protagonist, Kafuku, is a stage actor and director, who is grieving the loss of his wife. His feelings are complicated, as he is aware that she was having a secret affair with another man. In an ironic turn, Kafuku heals partly by meeting and “befriending” the man who cuckolded him (although “be-frenemy-ing” might be a better term for it). In their tense conversations, the two men never explicitly mention the affair, but they both know that they both know.
Kafuku also heals by bonding with his driver, a young woman who, like him, is numbed by past tragedies. At a key moment, they decide to take a road trip, covering almost the entire length of Japan. Personally, I love driving, and I found myself envying her job as a personal driver. And if I happen to make a therapeutic breakthrough and self-actualize during an epic cross-country drive, that would be an added bonus.
Side note: I followed up my viewing of the film by reading the Haruki Murakami short story from which it’s adapted. I’ve bounced off Murakami in the past because I don’t enjoy his portrayals of women, and the pattern continues here. Check this out for an opening line:
Based on the many times he had ridden in cars driven by women, Kafuku had reached the conclusion that most female drivers fell into one of two categories: either they were a little too aggressive or a little too timid.
It’s to the movie’s credit that this kind of broad stereotyping is omitted.
