Drive My Car — on the road to Oscars
“How to tell a shattered story? By slowly becoming everybody. No. By slowly becoming everything.”
This excerpt from the book ‘The Ministry of Utmost Happiness’ is the perfect description of how I felt after watching this Oscar nominated movie from Japan. Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, its tone is true to that which the author effortlessly achieves in every book he writes, now starting to be known as Haruki-esque. I think this feeling is very much embedded in the core of the Japanese existence. A country, which on one end of the spectrum is known for its advancements in technology, anime, video games and comics, on the other end, is infamously known as the land of lonely existence. A place where old people die after a life spent in oblivion. Where time and again, common citizens go on killing sprees in public places during their episodes of insanity.
If you research Japan, you’ll find that beyond the cherry blossomy picture of a Zen-like existence combined with modernity, there is a strict military like regime which Japanese people inflict on themselves to go through life. This is most commonly seen in the Japanese corporate world. The burden of righteousness, culture, history, ethics, can sometimes become too heavy for the very humane shoulders to carry.
Drive my car is the story of a theatre director and an actor, thus, very much involved with the professional arts, but still Haruki-esque at heart. That is to say, despite being associated with the liberal arts, there is an order to his life where, rarely an emotional high is experienced, and in many ways, sorrow is an accepted reality of life. I love that about Japan. I understand that.
While we spend our lives trying to seek pleasure and avoid pain,
our protagonist, Yusuke, a man in his 40s now, lives through both of them with equal acceptance. He is aware of the fact that his wife is cheating on him, but rejecting the simplicity of calling her an infidel, he goes through it silently, observing, feeling and understanding the many forms of love.
Like him, his wife Oto is involved in the profession of writing. After spending years stuck at home after the death of their daughter, she finally comes out of her shell and starts writing for TV. The numbness of this unfortunate incidence, over time, overlaps pleasure and pain for Oto. It is often during sex, that she closes her eyes to narrate stories to Yusuke to get transported to a mental place through her characters, where she can successfully orgasm. Not as a mother, not as wife, but as a woman acceptable first to herself.
Yusuke accepts this existence. He is happy to at least have Oto by his side. It is all he wants. Pain and pleasure is accepted in equal parts. But, this changes one day when he comes back home and finds Oto collapsed. She dies due to brain hemorrhage. A lot that Yusuke wanted to say to her was left unsaid. He would later reveal in the film that he had left home that day to just drive around the city and indulge in the mundaneness of his everyday existence, so that he could come back home later and live another day. He blames himself for not being there that day when Oto died. I killed her, Misaki, he says to another important character in the film, 2 years after the incident. Holding on to life, he stands still in the deep waters of sorrow for years. Misaki enters his life when Yusuke takes up a theatre-director job in Hiroshima.
He arrives in the city in his 15 year old red Saab 900 which shines far more than anything in the landscape, as if, it was hope on wheels. Misaki, a 23 year old young female chauffeur, is assigned by the theatre owners to drive Yusuke to and from work everyday for the next 3 months. A man, who had been on his own for years now, reluctantly agrees to let her drive his car, as if letting go of his strongly controlled existence for the first time in years. Misaki is a straight-faced young woman who rarely speaks. She performs her duties unceremoniously but with a strong sense of duty which almost seems meditative. An existence that ticks-on like time itself, Misaki’s life seems like the calm that sets after a storm. It is later in the movie that Misaki reveals to Mr. Yusuke, how she grew up around an abusive mother, who died in an unfortunate incidence of landslide when she was just 18.
I could have saved her, but I let her die, says Misaki.
After Oto’s death, this path brings Yusuke to Hiroshima where he directs the best play of his life with his wife’s ex lover in the lead. Perfectly aware of his past, Yusuke recruits him into the crew and what follows can only be described as acceptance and healing. Known to have an unstable past, the lead ends up committing a crime that results in his ousting from the play. Yusuke, who was merely directing the play, steps up to play the part. But before he performs on the final day, he asks Misaki to take him someplace peaceful. This is when Misaki gathers the courage to revisit her past by going to the very place where her mother died. And this is the most beautiful thing about sorrow that the movie perfectly captures.
It is not private.
No matter how strongly we indulge in our own, life often reveals how this emotion is shared by everyone we meet on the journey of life. And, just like love, it has the power to bring people together. Yusuke and Misaki, consumed by the ghosts of their past, continue to endure and reach a place where they can break in each other’s arms, not as lovers, but as fellow travellers on the path of life. Misaki’s monologue about life, standing next to the spot where she let her abusive mother die, is a blunt reflection of what life is, and why the show must go on.
A standout scene in the movie is when both Yusuke and Misaki light a couple of cigarettes in his car, which he was strictly against when he arrived in the city first, and, drive down the silent roads of Hiroshima. This beautiful sequence showed how our characters could still salvage a moment of pleasure and share it together, with the burning cigarettes raised out of the sunroof like a burning torch, as if to suggest of the times to come with a new light in their life.
Years after the play, the movie ends with a shot of Misaki having a smile on her face, the first in the entire movie, driving a red Saab 900 with a dog in the back, making me question, could embracing the sorrow, as we embrace the pleasure, be our path to liberation from what we call pain? Come to think of it, I believe, every story is a shattered story and we are everything.
Watch Drive My Car, an exceptional piece of Oscar nominated cinema out of Japan, that tells a shattered story about life running on a car named hope.
Written by storywallah for The FilmProfile.
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