One marriage, two movie reviews: Drive My Car by Ryusuke Hamaguchi

Drive My Car. Photo / Supplied

Greg and Zanna discuss the long and winding road of Drive My Car.

SCORES
Number of cars: 1
Number of occupants: 2
Number of deaths: 3

SHE SAW

For the first time in our reviewing history, Greg and I didn't watch this film together - he was interviewing director Ryusuke Hamaguchi and had to watch it in advance. Because Greg needs everyone he meets to like him, his review is of course now grossly compromised. Mine is less so, which is why I can say Drive My Car is a very long movie and feel fine about that. I can also say that it has an inordinate number of shots of a red car driving through various Japanese landscapes - very efficient-looking motorway systems, tunnels, coastal highways and snow-covered rural roads - with complete impunity.

I would like to carry on in this manner, tearing apart this movie because Greg can't or won't but unfortunately I enjoyed it too much. There's a reason why road trip movies are their own genre, in which this film doesn't really belong. There is something highly evocative about the image of a travelling car: a symbol of new beginnings, the desire for escape, leaving the past behind, among other things. Cars throw together strangers who would rather not sit so closely to one another in a confined space. And they provide the perfect setting for two people who know each other very well to have a difficult conversation without ever having to look each other in the eye. Both of those scenarios occur in this film to great effect.

The central story is based around an actor (Hidetoshi Nishijima) who travels to Hiroshima after the death of his wife to stage a production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya and is given a young female driver (Toko Miura) with whom he forms an unexpected bond. In its three-hour run time it explores grief and its entanglement with guilt and the ways in which we assign blame to ourselves and others, which is to say it's not a light film. You'd be hard-pressed to find a frame in which either of the two leads are smiling. But it is an emotionally stirring film that takes a circuitous though meaningful route to its conclusion.

There are long scenes of the multilingual cast of Uncle Vanya rehearsing that for me were an interesting detour into the acting process. However, a more literary person than I, someone like Greg, could better articulate the significance of the play in relation to the subject matter of the film. Now that I've read his review, however, I see he's chosen not to say anything about anything, which I can't imagine will endear him to Hamaguchi as much as he might think.

HE SAW

When Zanna asked me what I thought about the film. I got as far as: "If I think about feeling…" before she interrupted for the first time.
"Can you try not to put the frozen fruit down the bottom of the freezer?" she said. "That's for breads and buns."
I went on: "If I think about real human feeling and the evocation of same…"
"Mmhmm," she said, interrupting and sounding annoyed with me, despite the fact this was just my second attempt at a sentence and she had not allowed me to complete the first one either.
"Let's just accept for the sake of this situation," I said, "that a film is a machine for manufacturing human feeling. Can we accept that, just for a second?"
"Okay," she said, "Whatever."
"You seem very angry about it," I said.
"Well you're doing some big performance because you want to create something for the review and there's nothing that drives me more crazy."
I told her that was not what I was doing but I could see she didn't believe me. I pressed on: "I guess what I could reduce all this down to…"
"Yep," she interrupted, "Let's reduce it down."
"... Is this: Did it produce in me a feeling? And what was that feeling? And I guess when you ask whether a film was good or not, you're hypothesising as to the feeling it's trying to create, and saying, 'Did it succeed at that? Did it succeed on its own terms?' So then we try to figure out what the terms were. If we look at the central action of the film, it's really the staging of the play, but I would argue that the most important events are the three deaths. So the first one was …"
"Yeah," she said, interrupting, "I know what the three deaths are."
"Do you just want to skip to your thoughts?" I said.
"No, no," she said, "I just want you to say something that's not in riddles."
"How did the three deaths talk to each other?" I said. "What is it they're saying and how do they talk to us?"
"Hang on," she said. "Before, you were asking, 'Does the film evoke a feeling and is it successful in doing that?' You haven't finished that thought."
"This is part of it," I said.
"Mmhmm," she said loudly, and sighed.
I went on: "So then I think we need to look at each of the three deaths and what they…
"Ugh!" she said. "This is like listening to a podcast!"
I found this confusing. She loves podcasts.
"After all your bibbly babble," she said, "You have yet to say what kind of feeling you think the movie is trying to evoke."
."I'm trying to work towards it as I say it," I said. "Trying to figure it out."
"A feeling is something that happens in the moment," she said.
True, I thought, but it's also something that can linger for a long time afterwards.

Drive My Car is in cinemas now.