Drive My Car is racing towards the Oscars. Is it the next Parasite?
“Vehicles in general are important to me,” he says. “For a lot of dialogue scenes, if there is no motion in the background it’s actually not that interesting. It’s better to have conversations in some kind of moving object, a vehicle.” Trains and buses, which he used to create this visual interest in his earlier film Happy Hour, are very public; you can’t have the sort of intimate conversation we see here in a bus. “I felt that in order to get to the emotional authenticity of these characters, you want them to have a private space in order to speak frankly.”
He took a similarly practical approach to his play within the screenplay, Uncle Vanya. Chekhov’s enduring classic, which portrays the hapless last descendants of a landowning family stuck with running their declining estate in tsarist Russia, is merely mentioned in the Murakami story. Hamaguchi develops it as part of his own narrative, its themes of unfulfilled hopes and dreams echoing those in Drive My Car, creating a kind of call and response between the two parallel texts. Yusuke casts actors from different countries who all speak in their respective languages, including a deaf woman who plays Sonia, Vanya’s lovelorn niece, in sign language.
As actors performing in Uncle Vanya, Sonia Yuan and Park Yurim lack a shared language in Drive My Car.
For Hamaguchi, the use of multiple languages and surtitles solved another problem: how to reconcile stage acting with the demands of cinema. “Theatre actors are built to project to the back of the audience,” he says. “So when you put a camera up close, they look too big for the frame. The problem becomes: how do you get them to perform in a way commensurate with the cinema you’re trying to make?”
Taking away their responsibility for the words themselves, Hamaguchi reasoned, would oblige them to communicate with each other and their audience in the film through tone of voice and body language. “And you would have to respond to what you were seeing and hearing, without necessarily understanding the words themselves. So that would bring about an attentiveness to the performance that I wanted to have.”
Hamaguchi is 43. He has a background in documentary, which may explain the attention paid to every element within the frame in his features, as if he were constantly researching the corners of his own stories. The first of his films to break through internationally was Happy Hour (2015), which follows the shifting loyalties of four women friends in their 30s over five hours, with whole scenes delivered in real time.
Ryusuke Hamaguchi: “Infidelity is happening all the time!”Credit:Getty Images
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Asako I & II (2018) concerned a woman who falls in love with a man who is her old love’s double; it was this film that persuaded Murakami to agree to the adaptation. Before Drive My Car, Hamaguchi made Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, a trio of stories about strange or awkward meetings between strangers that go in unexpected directions. It won a Silver Bear at last year’s Berlin Film Festival. Lockdowns all over the world blocked its progress, but it will be released in Australia next month.
Drive My Car, meanwhile, is Japan’s entry to the Oscar race for Best International Feature. It is also presented to Academy members – “for your consideration”, as they say – for best picture overall. Six critics’ peak bodies in North America have voted it the best film of the year, which is not necessarily an accurate guide to its Oscar chances – the Academy leans more to populism than the New York Film Critics’ Circle, for sure – but it does indicate that the game has changed. Will Drive My Car be another Parasite, coming out of the East to the newly diversified Academy to take the most glittering prize of all?
Probably not – it is too long, too erudite and doesn’t have Bong Joon-ho’s anarchic sense of humour – but that’s where Hamaguchi is now. In a few months, he has gone from niche festival enthusiasm to serious contender. There it is on the Drive My Car posters: “A masterpiece,says the New York Times”. It’s a strong word, “masterpiece”. The Gray Lady doesn’t bandy it around lightly.
Drive My Car is in selected cinemas from February 10.
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