“Drive My Car”: why the Japanese film could surprise at the 2022 Oscars?

Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi chose one of legendary writer Haruki Murakami’s short stories called “Drive My Car” to make a movie, which bears the same name. In this story, a theater director suffers the death of his wife, while carrying out an important task: presenting in the theater an adaptation of the emblematic work “Uncle Vanya” (1899) by playwright Anton Chekhov. A story where the pain that life produces is as deep as that of death, and where love and infidelity can be considered best friends. The film, nominated for four categories at the Oscar Awards 2022strives to contemplate everything for almost three hours.

In the eyes of a Latino, Asian thinking can be intriguing. His gestures, his rules, his wisdom. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, bringing the critics of the 2021 Cannes Film Festival to their knees, has managed to bring the public closer to Japanese art by showing the character of his sparse, but intense characters. His film could make Japan’s cinema fashionable, as Akira Kurosawa did in 1951 with the victory before the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) of the award-winning film “Rashomon”. And as he did in 1976 with “Derzu Uzala”, the best foreign film of that year.

“Drive My Car” is easy to understand, as long as you watch it lucid and rested, because it doesn’t talk about a samurai warrior or the politics of the Japanese state, but rather starts from the most common question in the world: how do we face death? That, in the long run, is how we face life. Supported by Anton Chekhov, the Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi places before us the pain of a man who has just lost his wife. At the same time, this playwright is directing actors with a different method. All of them are of different nationalities and must bring out the best of themselves on stage. On his side, he listens every day to the recordings of the work recited in life by his wife. In addition, the film shows the feeling of loss, not only of the protagonist, but also of the rest of the characters, who face death in one way or another.

For Jimena Mora, documentary filmmaker and professor at the Center for Oriental Studies of the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru (PUCP), the only character who should win all the Oscars is the deaf actress (in the film) Lee Yoon-a, who is played by South Korean artist Park Yu Rim. “The moment when she is acting in the play, explaining to the protagonist when we are going to rest as human beings from what this maelstrom of life is, that it is hard, that it is difficult. In this scene, she touches the essence of the playwright Anton Chekhov’s work. Beautifull. It’s worth watching ‘Drive My Car’ to get to that scene. Her performance has an honesty, a closeness, a sweetness, that you don’t see in the whole movie. All the characters are super laconic. His performances are very minimal. Except for the young Japanese actor Masaki Okada, who has an uncontrolled character,” says Mora, who is also the founder of the Japanese film research group focused on Asian and Nikkei directors in Peru, Futari.

In “Drive My Car”, the characters have a serious countenance and the cinematographic shots are contemplative. According to Oscar Rondan, a member of the Japanese literature research group Tenjin (天神学) and director of the Satori Cultural Association, the story of Haruki Murakami, which was adapted into the film, involves traumatic events, such as the death of a family member or the infidelity, a way of reconnecting people with their emotions, something extremely complex in Japanese culture.

“Unlike, perhaps, contemporary Western cinema, where the priority is the emotion of a blockbuster cinema, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s cinema tries to return to these classic shots of Japanese cinema, almost frozen in time, which are the shots of works like ‘Tokyo Monogatari’, where the director Yasujiro Ozu makes a shot of two grandparents eating for 15 minutes. One would say what emotion is in that! But the emotion is, not that many things are happening at the same time, but in the detention, precisely in that impossibility, hyperspeed of a capitalist society. stop. To stay. The conversations, the silent spaces. It gives a certain dramatic weight”, says Rondan.

IN JAPAN

As theater is a means of catharsis, what a playwright wants is for his characters to produce uncomfortable emotions. For this reason, Chekhov’s work presents beings degraded by society and unable to communicate. Thus, we can see scenes of two men who take a seat in a bar to have an uncomfortable conversation about the woman they both loved in life, as in Hamaguchi’s film. And although the characters talk about it up close, they seem very far away.

“Discomfort in classical Japanese culture was catharsis-producing. They, seeing any work of art, understood an emotionality different from ours. There is a term that is used a lot in Japanese aesthetics, yūgen (幽玄), the fear of something unknown infinitely bigger than us. That feeling when faced with something gigantic, but unable to observe it, has a very strong reception in the Japanese public”, says Oscar Rondan. Part of that is seen in “Drive my car”, when the protagonist listens to the stories of his dead wife every day through recorded tapes. Almost a funeral tale.

In Eastern culture, there are roles that must be fulfilled and that repress people to a certain extent, so art is always their best weapon to express themselves when they cannot do so socially. Both Jimena Mora and Oscar Rondan agree that a part of Japanese society has certain established norms, which simply cannot be broken. As they explain, honne is a term that means “what you show to society” and tatemae, “your inner reality”. The second is frowned upon, when the important thing is to reflect a “satisfactory social role; be a good wife, a good worker, a good citizen.”

There is a scene in “Drive My Car” that reflects that idea of ​​Japanese obligation in all its glory. Near the end of the film, a death occurs (without spoilers) that puts the director of the play in a dilemma. Then the Japanese organizers of the stage play, played by Satoko Abe of Japan and Perry Dizon of the Philippines, approach him and tell him that he only has two options to solve the problem, A or B. feeling and that everything has happened so quickly, he must execute one of the alternatives, because his protocols require it.

“Those in charge of seeing the entire agenda of the theater director tell him: we are very sorry, but there are only two possibilities, either continue with the play or cancel it. He is not thinking about his commitment to the organizations, but about the murder that just happened and his added pain. It’s in his drama. But, for them, there is nothing to process. As if they told him that he can process it on his behalf, but the rules are the rules. That part of Japan, where things have to be done and commitments cannot be broken. Almost, almost, it doesn’t matter what. Because if that were a conversation between Peruvians it would be totally different. People would fight etc. And I’m not saying that one is better than the other, but rather that they are different”, says Jimena Mora, who studied film in the Japanese city of Kyoto and understood these cultural differences over time.

While Latinos talk about relationships, Japanese people prefer to watch them. Although there are many exceptions, Japanese cinema tends to go for a more unique perspective of what life and people mean when you watch them. That is what the work of Ryusuke Hamaguchi has shown. This article sees one or two metaphors from his script, because after almost three hours in front of the screen, depending on each person, the director does not impose. It allows for the discovery of one’s own reflection on history. Not necessarily for you to enjoy it, but to make you uncomfortable as a joy.