Things that come to mind 1 - Drive My Car (2021)
“Things that come to mind” is a series of blog entries that I will be writing on stream of consciousness. Each of these entries will be given a duration of 24 hours to write and edit.
mild spoiler content
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I didn’t think I would be compelled to read the snippets of Haruki Murakami’s “Men Without Women” that Ryusuke Hamaguchi has selected in order to find out what has changed, replaced, and kept there. Similarly, a lot of what I have meditated on while the film was going on had to deal with those three things.
I went to watch Drive My Car last Saturday, and invited a friend impromptu. We sat together towards the top right after finding out that the remaining seating options were cursed. I kept blabbing to them constantly while advertisements and promo were going on, talking about how the last time I went to theaters I saw Blade Runner 2047 and fell asleep for a majority of it (most people who have had conversations about movies will have heard me tell this story). The last words I have said prior to the start of the film were “Just let me know if I’m talking too much.”, but I ended up not saying anything throughout the viewing (sans the occasional giggle or “holy shit”).
The entire, 80%-capacity-full theater was also silent, and I did not notice anyone getting up for any sort of break. It is easy to say that Drive My Car put the entire space in a trance. The film was masterfully executed. It had that rare generosity to allow for the viewer to phase in and out as they pleased, think through things from scene to scene, and left room for personal interpretation.
The theater cleared out, and my impromptu invitee, S, mentioned that Murakami’s writing style is more western in comparison to that of most Japanese literature. If I remember correctly, S told me that the concept of paragraphs are not traditionally used in Japanese novels, and Murakami’s prose flows with length in comparison. It should also be reiterated that a lot of translation work is dependent on style, and will deeply impact one’s reading of the text. Unfortunately, I do not know enough Japanese to figure out any nuances or subtleties that are covered, but just read on.
The translation that I have read in order to revisit the contents of this movie is by Philip Gabriel and Ted Goossen, published in English via Penguin Random House Books in 2017.
If I can list some cosmetic differences: the Yellow Saab 9000 turned into a Red Saab 900 Turbo. Kafuku was more verbose and not calculated as a character, as his introspections were only limited to only thinking about his wife and intimacy. The movie was way less horny without a purpose than expected, which served a huge favor in its impeccable delivery. And most importantly, Hamaguchi’s choice in providing no flashback scenes was my favorite directorial and sequencing choice in the whole production.
The protagonist, Kafuku, is portrayed as astronomically multi-faceted compared to the short story incarnation of Drive My Car. A true soft sadboy through and through, the character of Kafuku transformed from someone wallowing in his past with the aid of alcohol to someone who is confronted with the trials and tribulations of moving on. The entire cast’s performance was phenomenal, and it is self-evident that the acting chemistry is tight. This subtle play of dynamics while acting while talking about acting while acting as acting is no easy feat to achieve, and proved powerful in the development of all the characters in the movie. Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya was not used as an accessory to make the writing seem cultured, but a way to progress and interplay the emotional turmoil, trauma, and experiences of disconnect that each character experiences, and how they respectively deal with their own pasts.
2 or so years after his screenwriter wife Oto’s passing, Yusuke Kafuku, has been commissioned to direct a stage production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya for an arts center in Hokkaido. As part of his directorial choice, Kafuku chose to direct a multilingual version, where all the lines are spoken and signed in each actor’s first language. As the cast has been set, Kafuku notes that some cast members did not get the desired role that they hoped for. Honestly, the message taken here to me was fairly simple: you do not choose what you project onto the world, but your chosen actions towards karmic retribution will reveal what you project out there. I really don’t have a better way to phrase this, but this part is super integral to thinking about the character progression of Misaki Watari, the driver, and Koji Takatsuki, a young actor reluctantly cast for the role of Uncle Vanya.
Although this is one of many crude takeaways to what I have had as an overlying concept of the film, I kind of just ignored thinking about morals and “the bottom line” in general due to the complex layering of script and dialogue incorporated throughout the movie. There was an interview that I have read that in the parts where the cast of Uncle Vanya were reciting their lines, Hamaguchi uses a similar method with the cast of the movies that he has written. The lines were brought to life but stabbed repeatedly as “just read[ing] the script”. The script served as a memory through the voice of a dead lover. Acting carried on and brought out past demons and parallels, with even Kafuku stating that the script “becomes part of you” or something along the lines of that. Such grave reminders, combined with his own unresolved past, made our leading roles stand face-to-face with their feelings of loneliness and isolation, and in an exception in the most extreme case: eventually brought Takatsuki to his downfall.
What’s most interesting to me, however, is the development of Misaki. As an onlooker of Kafuku’s progress with the stage production, Misaki initially refuses to visit the play’s first script reading sessions. As the cast’s reading got better, Misaki eventually became more and more curious about the play, and spectated practice sessions. In the source material, Misaki is depicted as stoic and blunt, with little to no regard about social customs. Everything about Misaki is stated as fact, and it seems like she was there in writing only to serve as an opener to Kafuku being sad about why his dead wife has slept with other men, to a man that his dead wife used to sleep with. Needless to say, there wasn’t a tinge of that empathy and kinship between Misaki and Kafuku in the short story, unlike the film. Acting as Kafuku’s own ELIZA, short story Misaki was merely a sounding board who coined predictable responses just so that Kafuku can do some introspection
-i went out to eat lunch at this time, 11:50, i came back to write 12:32.
on what he remembers of his marriage. I don’t really find the “trauma dumping” that horrendous because the poor guy needs it, but what really was annoying was the sudden turn towards Kafuku’s flashback, right after Misaki attempted to connect with Kafuku. Takatsuki was reduced to a hole brother and in usual Haruki Murakami fashion, the characters became anthropological material for Freudians. Speaking of which, I don’t want to talk about Scheherazade, nor Kino, because they seemed very insignificant to compare (most parts of both stories were cherry-picked as supplementary and world-building content), and suffers from the same complexes that the written Drive My Car does.
I think it is safe to say that Hamaguchi’s careful editing and discretion has opened a whole world of pathos, — or as I have read in the comments of S’s twitter post on Drive My Car, “poggo no aware”, it is with no wonder that every five or so minutes, I would be slackjawed underneath my KN95 mask in the movie theater. It definitely is some sort of sick burn to the acclaimed author and his subject content, and is one that will not recover for quite a while. Drive my Car (2021) is a powerful exercise in what can be transformed from a few short stories to a 179 minute-long film, and brings hope to a world where video adaptations can also, actually, be Very Good.