It is an inherently ambitious undertaking to collage four disparate works — three short stories and a play — into one story, then translate them into the medium of film. Yet Hamaguchi manages to use this framing to enrich the original story, weaving this process of adaptation and translation into the core of the film. Hamaguchi is adapting prose into the film, his characters are adapting
Vanya for a multi-lingual play, and the play becomes a conduit for Kafuku to express his suppressed grief and anger. Layered over the original plot of
Drive My Car, the three new narratives become a lens through which the viewer understands Kafuku’s story, allowing for a more effective exploration of its original themes and bringing them to a fuller conclusion.
In
Drive My Car, fiction exists as both mirror and translator, allowing characters to identify themselves within it and articulate feelings they are afraid or ashamed of. In the first half of the film, it is as though Kafuku’s only way of expressing his emotions is through reciting the lines of
Vanya.
In a manner bordering on pathetic fallacy, these lines are almost an exact mirror to his emotions, strategically scattered throughout the film to reflect inexpressible truths. It is little wonder, then, that he initially refuses to reprise his role as Vanya. “Chekhov is terrifying,” Kafuku says. “When you say his lines, it drags out the real you. I can’t bear that anymore.” After all, when we are introduced to him, it is almost exclusively through Vanya’s anger and misery that he can express his own. This begins to influence the other actors as well — in lieu of confrontation and confession, the play
Vanya acts as a psychological conduit through which the characters understand themselves and communicate with others. They are constantly speaking to each other in stories, in anecdotes, in repressed emotion. We tell stories, the film seems to argue, so that we can make sense of our place in reality, so we can scold, apologise, and love one another, even when we do not have the courage to do so ourselves.
Because the film is not limited to the short story’s first-person perspective — a perspective that has been recently criticised for its naval-gazing misogyny — the story can also expand beyond Kafuku’s rumination, giving other characters more depth and agency. This is most notable in the treatment of Misaki’s character. No longer reduced to a conduit for Kafuku’s development, the film removes any romantic tension between them and gives her a full backstory, framing her character development as a parallel journey to Kafuku’s. It then feels appropriate that she is the last character to appear in the ending: in a cast of characters battling inner demons, she ultimately emerges as a figure of hope, the youngest character with the most potential to overcome grief and move on in life.
Space, Silence, and Intimacy
Drive My Car
is not a stylistically complicated film. There is a consistent use of emptiness as meditation, both in terms of space and sound, and most of the scenes are framed conservatively. Wide angle shots to visually lengthen the characters’ emotional distance, medium shots to communicate their emotions. Nonetheless, it is effective in emphasizing the physical distance between characters and the smallness of their existence. For most of the film, Kafuku is unwilling to confront his grief or let others witness it — that includes the audience.
Even in climactic scenes, the characters are often shot with a wide angle lens, or their faces are obscured by shadow.
