Drive My Car
ドライブ・マイ・カー
The Moonlight essay
CinemaDrive My Car and the Intimacy of Not Forcing Another Person’s Silence OpenRead the essayStoryline
The whole story, ending included.
A widower learns his wife's lovers were part of her creative life; Oscar winner about what marriages do not say.
Yusuke Kafuku, a stage actor and director in Tokyo, learns his lines while driving his red Saab, from tapes his wife, Oto, records for him. Oto writes for television, and her stories come to her after they make love; she tells them to him aloud. One day, home unexpectedly, Yusuke finds her in bed with a young actor, Koji Takatsuki, and slips away without a word. Soon afterwards Oto asks to talk to him that evening. He drives around for hours instead, and comes home to find her dead of a brain haemorrhage.
Two years later he goes to Hiroshima to direct a multilingual production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, each actor performing in their own language, among them Lee Yoo-na, who plays Sonya in Korean Sign Language. The festival insists he be driven in his own car, by a quiet young woman, Misaki Watari. Unexpectedly he casts Koji, who admits he loved Oto, as Vanya. In the car after a night of drinking, Koji tells him the end of a story Oto never finished telling her husband. On the long drives Yusuke and Misaki begin to talk. She learned to drive by chauffeuring her abusive mother, who was killed when a landslide destroyed their house in Hokkaido, and she has left the scar on her cheek from that day untreated. Yusuke tells her that he and Oto lost a small daughter, who would be Misaki's age now, and that he knew of Oto's affairs and believes she loved him all the same.
Koji is arrested: a man he beat for photographing him has died. Yusuke must play Vanya himself or cancel. He asks Misaki to drive him to her old home in Hokkaido. On the way he admits that if he had gone home that night he might have saved Oto; she admits that she did not pull her mother from the wreckage. At the snowy ruins of her house they hold each other. Yusuke plays Vanya, and at the end Lee Yoo-na signs Sonya's last speech, promising that they will rest.
Some time later Misaki is living in South Korea. She drives the red Saab, a dog in the back seat. The scar on her cheek has almost faded.
Starring
Hidetoshi Nishijimaas Yusuke Kafuku
A stage actor and director, widowed by his wife's sudden death, who goes to Hiroshima to direct Uncle Vanya.
Yusuke Kafuku’s story
Yusuke and Oto lost their daughter and hold on to their habits: the stories she tells after sex, the tapes of lines she records for his drives. When he sees her having sex with Koji, he leaves without a word and keeps the marriage as it was. The evening she wants to talk, he drives around until late and comes home to find her dead. After the funeral he breaks down playing Vanya and stops acting. In Hiroshima he casts Koji as Vanya, and one night, in the car, hears from him the end of a story Oto never finished. When Koji is arrested, he asks Misaki to take him to her home in Hokkaido; at the snowy ruins of her house he faces how deeply Oto hurt him, and they hold each other. He plays Vanya himself.
Toko Miuraas Misaki Watari
The reserved young driver assigned to Yusuke, carrying her own grief from a landslide in Hokkaido.
Misaki Watari’s story
Misaki grew up alone with her abusive mother in a Hokkaido village, driving her to her bar job from junior-high age and learning to drive smoothly because a bad ride earned her a blow. When a landslide killed her mother, she drove west until the car broke down in Hiroshima, and stayed. Driving Yusuke's Saab, she says nothing and asks nothing. Slowly she talks: about her mother, the refuse lorries she used to drive, the scar on her cheek she has left untreated. When Koji is arrested, she drives Yusuke to Hokkaido and admits that she escaped the landslide and did not pull her mother from the wreckage. At the ruins of her house they hold each other. Later she is living in South Korea, driving the red Saab with a dog in the back, her scar almost gone.
Masaki Okadaas Koji Takatsuki
A young television actor who was one of Oto's lovers, and whom Yusuke casts as Vanya.
Koji Takatsuki’s story
Koji's impulsiveness has cost him his work in Tokyo. Oto once took him to see Yusuke in Waiting for Godot, which moved him deeply, and when he sees the audition in Hiroshima he applies at once. Yusuke casts him as Vanya. Over drinks he admits he loved Oto, and snaps at a stranger who photographs him. Another night he slips out of the bar to confront another photographer. Afterwards, in the Saab with Misaki driving, he tells Yusuke the end of a story that Oto began for her husband and finished only for Koji, darker than anything Yusuke knew. Days before the opening, the police take him from rehearsal: the man he beat has died.
Reika Kirishimaas Oto Kafuku
Yusuke's wife, a television writer who tells him her stories in bed, sees other men, and dies suddenly.
Park Yu-rimas Lee Yoo-na
A Korean actress who plays Sonya in Korean Sign Language, married to one of the festival's organisers.
Why it matters
Drive My Car is about grief that cannot begin until it is spoken, and about how seldom two people who share a bed say what they mean. Yusuke knew of Oto's affairs and chose silence to keep his marriage; the film treats that silence not as tact but as a wound, and lets him find words only in a car with a stranger and on a stage, in other people's languages. Its Uncle Vanya, played in several languages at once, among them Korean Sign Language, becomes a way of listening past words. Adapted from a Haruki Murakami short story, it won Best Screenplay at Cannes in 2021 and the Academy Award for Best International Feature, and was the first Japanese film nominated for Best Picture. What it leaves is a plain, hard thought, spoken at the end in sign: the living have to go on, and honesty about the dead is part of going on.