Drive My Car - a film review

You could call this film “Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima” in echo of Louis Malle’s “Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street” as another way of exploring Chekhov’s play about futility and despair. Ryusuke Hamaguchi doesn’t get his actor/director to Hiroshima until well into his story, but arguably he could have started with a recently-widowed man taking a job with a community theater – a two-month respite from a soured life in Tokyo. 

Hamaguchi starts, however, with the marriage of Yusuke Kafuku (Kaf-ku?) and Oto – she is a successful writer for television who gets ideas during sex, narrating them to Kafuku who later recites the stories back to her so she can write them down. One day he comes home from a cancelled flight to find her having sex with Koji Takatsuke, the popular young star of her series. He says nothing, and they are unaware of his intrusion. He quietly leaves, bottling up whatever this discovery stirs in him. 

Adding to the weight of this secret is Takatsuke’s appearance in Hiroshima to audition for a part in “Uncle Vanya.” Everyone at the theater assumes Kafuku will play Vanya, which suits his age and temperament, but instead he casts Takatsuke in the role. A surprise of another sort awaits Kafuku – due to a previous car accident in which a guest actor injured someone, Kafuku cannot drive his beloved red Saab. A driver is appointed – if he won’t accept Misaka his contract is null. So she becomes his driver. 

At first he is uneasy – he’s used to rehearsing lines while driving – but she assures him she doesn’t mind, he should do whatever he is accustomed to. And he does. Her silence and expressionless mien make it easy for him to work on the play from the back seat, without noticing her – she is unattractive, dressed in jeans, work shirt, and a shabby sport coat. But gradually he becomes curious about her; she takes him to the refuse center where she used to drive a truck, and bit by bit her story comes out. 

Again we see the power of Chekhov to move people. Takatsuke flounders as Vanya, and we learn he is in Hiroshima to wait out a scandal. Paparazzi snap pictures of him any time he’s in public, and he chases and assaults them. Takatsuke describes himself as empty, and Kafuku concurs – he chose not to play Vanya because to act well, he must open himself to the depths of the character, and he is unwilling to accept that vulnerability. But Takatsuke carries himself aloof from Vanya’s interior, which makes his acting suffer.

This film explores the hierarchy of theater, in which the director stays apart. The actors have a group bitch session after a reading all found unsatisfactory, but Kafuku has already left. The actors stay in Hiroshima, while his hotel is an hour’s drive away. The producers are there to smooth things over and enforce their set of rules. 

The Korean woman with the role of Sonya is mute, and plays her part using meticulously expressive sign language, which her husband translates to the cast and director. The actor playing Vanya’s young wife speaks English and Mandarin, Takatsuke speaks only Japanese. Chekhov would approve of this multi-lingual cast who cannot comprehend each other’s words. Humans failing to understand each other is the essence of his work. 

My only quibble is that the viewer has to know "Uncle Vanya" for the film to have full impact. In “Uncle Vanya on 42nd Street” we see the progress of the play – the cast is rehearsing, with takeout coffee cups and street clothes, but the lines are Chekhov’s, and finally it dawns on us that we're watching the play – we don’t need sets, costumes, props. In “Drive My Car” the focus is on the lives of director, actors, and driver – the moving moments of the play are adrift from its full story.

A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles

This elegant 2016 novel crosses time (1922-1954) in a very constrained space. The fellow of the title, Count Alexander (Sasha) Rostov, is under house arrest in the Hotel Metropol in the center of Moscow. Holding fast to his gentlemanly principles, he makes the best of his restrictions, in the process offering lessons to those around him of what living well consists of, and how it is practiced.  His “descent” from nobility lands him among the free spirits of the hotel staff; though their tasks are menial, they perform them with enviable grace and pleasure.

The plot hangs on his relationships with a nine-year-old girl whose impulsive curiosity draws him into friendship, and later her six-year-old daughter whom he raises as his own child. If one were to voice complaints about so charming a tale, one might bring up the ease with which the Count adapts to his shrinking privileges - it seldom takes him more than a moment, an hour, or a day, to adjust. Why, one might wonder, does he not only remain alive while most of his aristocratic peers have been murdered or shipped off to Siberia, but drinks in the Metropol’s lovely bar with international journalists and the occasional diplomat? One might carp about the buffoonery of the apparatchiks who made the existence of so many Russians so unlivable, or quibble with the characters, so easily sorted into “good guys” who have deep, useful skills and joie de vivre, vs. “bad guys” who are petty, vindictive, and lack soul.  And above all, how, in such a finite space, is Rostov able to keep his secrets, the keys to his vitality?

I won’t spoil the story by answering those challenges. But I will say that it is such a delight to read this fluid prose, and to appreciate this kind well-mannered gentleman, that one forgives Mr. Towles for allowing the Count a better life than he could so easily have endured. The appeal of the novel rides in no small part on its philosophical asides, for example:

“For however decisive the Bolsheviks’ victory had been over the privileged classes on behalf of the Proletariat, they would be having banquets soon enough... [H]aving gathered around a grand circle of tables, the new statesmen would nod their heads in order to indicate to a waiter... that yes, they would have a few more spears of asparagus.

For pomp is a tenacious force. And a wily one too.

How humbly it bows its head as the emperor is dragged down the steps and tossed in the street. But then, having quietly bided its time, while helping the newly appointed leader on with his jacket, it compliments his appearance and suggests the wearing of a medal or two.”

The hotel itself is as important a character as anyone who passes through its revolving doors, and in the Count’s company we explore it from boiler room to roof, back stairs and front suites, the finest restaurant in Russia, and a ballroom where the Soviet assembly argues details of policy. Its position overlooking Theater Square guarantees visits by performers and artists, international tourists, diplomats, and spies. Its legacy as a premiere hotel is grounded in its capable staff: doorman, seamstress, and barber; chef, maitre d’, and headwaiter; and concierge, bartender, and conductor of the late-evening ensemble, to name but a few.

Towles’s understanding of Russia is essential to the book, and through his characters paying homage to their culture, offers us a taste of Russian soul.

“ 'But with Chekhov and Tolstoy, we Russians have set the bronze bookends on the mantelpiece of narrative. Henceforth, writers of fictions from wheresoever they hail, will place themselves on the continuum that begins with the one and ends with the other. For who, I ask you, has exhibited better mastery of the shorter form than Chekhov in his flawless little stories? Precise and uncluttered, they invite us into some corner of a household at some discrete hour in which the entire human condition is suddenly within reach, if heartbreakingly so. While at the other extreme: Can you conceive of a work greater in scope than War and Peace? One that moves so deftly from the parlor to the battlefield and back again? That so fully investigates how the individual is shaped by history, and history by the individual?' ” [The Count, enumerating to a German challenger Russia's contributions to the West]

The author is too modest to place himself in that pantheon, but by honoring writers and poets throughout the book, he elevates his own chances.