People Who Stare at Streets

Yusuke looks out the window. Under the voice of his late wife, houses, trees, and the sea fly past him. He doesn’t even notice another person sitting in front of him in the red Saab 900 Turbo, while he fills in the sentences’ gaps with his own words. Misaki will soon get him to a place where he can finally find himself. I watched Drive My Car by Ryusuke Hamaguchi last night. The Oscar-winning Best International Film, based on the short story of the same name from Haruki Murakami’s 2014 book Men Without Women, recounts the experiences of two people whose fateful encounter no one could have foreseen - least of all themselves.

Successful stage actor and director Yusuke lives in Tokyo and is married to Oto, a beautiful playwright with whom he shares a peaceful life despite a painful past. When Oto dies, Yusuke is left with unanswered questions and the regret that he couldn’t truly understand her. Two years later, Yusuke accepts an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. There, he meets Misaki, a young chauffeur hiding a traumatic past of her own. His increasingly intimate conversations with Misaki force him to confront uncomfortable truths and uncover haunting secrets left behind by his wife.

Misaki’s character reminds me of someone I know. Her sober, disarming, and perceptive manner invites me to want to know more about her. The conversations in Drive My Car are like dances with the purpose of building bridges to other people. Only those who haven’t even begun to try to understand Drive My Car would describe it as calm. Every scene is seething, bursting with human emotions. Its characters have shed any childishness and try to maneuver themselves safely through the thicket of painful memories, only to have to admit to themselves at the end that they cannot drive away from the past - not even in a red Saab 900 Turbo.