Drive My Car; Bitters End Based on: Haruki Murakami’s “Drive My Car”

Drive My Car; Bitters End
Based on: Haruki Murakami’s “Drive My Car”

In adapting “Drive My Car,” Ryusuke Hamaguchi took Haruki Murakami’s lean two-person story from Men Without Women and built out the world. Now, the film follows Yusuke, a grieving stage actor/director, as he directs a multilingual adaptation of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya.Engaging with his enigmatic young driver, his wife’s disembodied voice on a series of acting tapes, and his cast—including a young man who Yusuke knows had an affair with his wife—he struggles to recognize and digest his own great loss. It’s a quiet, crystalline story about pain and guilt and moving on; it’s also one of the most faithful pieces of art about acting I’ve ever seen. Hamaguchi tracks the emotional shifts of the rehearsal room, and understands how embodying a piece of text lets you feel your realities more deeply, see yourself, push forward. Corny: I cried, thinking, “Theater is important!” (Not to be like, “In a pandemic year,” but in a pandemic year . . . ) Though the film is distinctly Hamaguchi’s, its attention to its characters’ isolations feels true to Murakami’s vision; Hamaguchi told The Wrap that Murakami said “he was not sure which portions he had written—which came from his original work and which hadn’t.” Drive My Car is probably my favorite movie of the year. (Sorry, Titane. Should have come from a book.)  –Walker Caplan, Staff Writer