Watching the rehearsals, we can appreciate both the effect that Yūsuke is going for, and the agonizingly laborious work of achieving it. The largely amateur cast is forced to feed off the rhythms of each other’s dialogue the show’s eventual audience has a wall of subtitles at their disposal, but the people on stage are left to intuit what they can from their fellow performers and fill in the rest. If Yūsuke really has to know the script by heart, it’s only because his big gimmick is that each of his actors are asked to deliver their lines in their first language (which might be Japanese, or Mandarin, or Tagalog, or even Korean Sign Language). Nishijima’s implosive performance invites us to draw our own conclusions, but there’s a strong whiff of therapeutic sadomasochism around Yūsuke’s ritual, as Chekhov’s text permits him to mechanically say things like “my life is lost” and “that woman doesn’t deserve forgiveness for her infidelity” out loud in the privacy of his car.Ĭuriously, Yūsuke still does this even though he’s decided that it would be too painful for him to act in this production (“Chekhov is terrifying because his lines drag the real out of you,” he concedes). Before her death, Oto recorded herself reading all but one of the parts in “Uncle Vanya,” as she always had for the scripts Yūsuke needed to memorize two years and presumably several cancelled productions later, Yūsuke agrees to stage his unique version of Chekhov’s play in Hiroshima. Then again, Yūsuke has never required such a literal excuse to avoid making eye contact with his crises, and Hamaguchi allows his characters to retreat into an eerie state of numbness whenever the hollow tremble of Eiko Ishibashi’s glassy score washes over them like a drink too cold to taste.īut what Yūsuke most clearly recalls about Oto is her voice, in large part because he still listens to it every day as he drives. Or maybe his wife’s infidelity was something he missed in his blind spot - the same blind spot that causes him to crash his beloved red Saab as he drives around Tokyo to calm down (a doctor diagnoses him with glaucoma, but optometry is rarely seen without its metaphors).
Yūsuke doesn’t confront Oto about what he’s seen, which suggests the possibility that he might have seen it before. He will also recall other details from the film’s mesmeric 40-minute prologue, especially the moment he came home to discover Oto writhing on top of a handsome young actor (Masaki Okada as the nervy and impulsive Kōji Takatsuki). “She’d grasp a thread of a story from the edge of orgasm,” Yūsuke will recall later, two years after he finds Oto dead from a cerebral hemorrhage on the floor of their apartment.
Car films tv#
She jolts up in bed during the pre-dawn hours, possessed by an idea for the erotically charged TV pilot she’s trying to crack with her theater star husband, Yūsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijimai). “Drive My Car” shifts into gear with a prologue that’s pure Murakami - a voice that Hamaguchi and his co-writer Takamasa Oe imitate with ease - as sex coaxes a naked woman named Oto (Reika Kirishima) into a creative fugue state.
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Car films plus#
New Movies: Release Calendar for December 10, Plus Where to Watch the Latest Films Not incidentally, it’s also a drama about a man who projects certain assumptions onto the women in his life because he’s scared to death of learning their truth. The result is a low-key but lingeringly resonant tale about a strange chapter in the life of a grieving theater director - an intimate stage whisper of a film in which every scene feels like a secret. That’s what Lee Chang-dong did with “Burning,” and that’s what Hamaguchi does here (albeit with a gentler touch, and to less fiery ends). And why not? If the brief and uneven history of Murakami adaptations has taught us anything, it’s that the sensually aloof solipsism of his writing is best interpreted by people who aren’t afraid to impose their own will upon it.
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