CIFF Notes: Drive My Car (Sunday Oct 24 - 4pm)

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car earned a special "Best of the Fest" screening on the final day of the Chicago International Film Festival, and while I missed out on a number of potentially great films toward the end of the fest--including Zhang Yimou's One Second, Radu Jude's Bad Luck Banging or Loony Porn, and Rebecca Hall's Passing (which I've seen on Netflix since the festival, worth it particularly for the terrific performance of Tessa Thompson)--Hamaguchi's novelistic adaptation of the short story by Haruki Murakami turned out to be a perfect closer for my festival experience. This patiently observed and deeply felt adaptation won the best screenplay award Cannes, and with a running time of nearly three hours the film is infused with an engaging sense of passing time and a Chekhovian contemplation of mortality that earns it's lengthy run time, consistently turning up unexpected revelations of character that ultimately make up the dynamic fabric of the entire piece. 

Anton Chekhov's landmark work of Stanislavski-era realism Uncle Vanya plays a major role in this film that is, in part, about actors and directors and the theatrical process. The parallels to Chekhov's play are carefully woven into the overarching narrative of Drive of My Car, which also involves actor/director Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) losing his wife and creative collaborator Oto (Reika Kirishima) to a brain aneurysm, and his process of directing a new production of Uncle Vanya after her death. The new producers of this multi-lingual production of Uncle Vanya mandate the director use a chauffeur, the sullen and somewhat affectless Misaki (Tôko Miura). Miura's Misaki is an oddly compelling portrayal, as we watch her quiet countenance process the precarious, ongoing relationship Kafuku maintains with Ota via audio recordings Ota had made for him of her reading the other roles in Uncle Vanya as a memorization tool; the ritual of repetition that was once a regular part of Kafuku's commute now a necessary ritual of grieving, with Misaki caught in the middle. The relationship that grows between Kafuku and Misaki along these drives is one that evokes a number of possible outcomes, but, like a Chekhov play, character usurps the primacy of plot, and what follows feels much more like life lived than a series of plot mechanisms. There's no moment where Misaki takes over the role of Sonya, and no detours into forced romantic interludes. As keenly aware of conventional dramatic tropes as Chekhov was in his time, Hamaguchi delicately puts these possibilities into play, and then opts for drawing connections between these characters that are much riskier and complicated. Like Chekhov, he takes his time, and allows time to work on the audience.

To be clear, this is a movie whose title sequence only arrives over 30 minutes into the film, so forgive me if I overstate it's "slow cinema" qualities--a troublesome moniker anyway, unfortunately tagged on films like this that never feel "slow" to me at all. Yet, while I'm not sure each revelation of character in Drive My Car landed emotionally for me, the overall studied and measured approach of the film is entirely effective here, and the final scene involving a performance of Sonia's monologue from Uncle Vanya in Korean sign language brought the film, as well as my entire festival experience, to a perfectly silent and emotionally resonant place.   

At fest's end, my 2021 CIFF experience proved to be a unique mix of either the relentlessly paced or the slow-and-steady, and even though there were varying degrees of success in both modes, I'm grateful for the thoughtful subversion of form throughout much of what I saw. The short path I managed to carve through the festival achieved something near ideal for me--a concentrated infusion of what some of our great cinematic artists are capable of showing us now, especially welcome in the wake of this fucked up year, as we continue to gaze through fogged glasses perched over our face masks. At the risk of seeming hopeful in increasingly pessimistic times, I hope audiences come around to experiences like this more commonly as cinema-going finds it's legs again, because what's utterly profound about festivals like the CIFF, and great cinema in general, has not gone anywhere.

Special thanks to my pal Brian Morgan for joining me this year. Great movies only get better with great friends. Thanks for being there, Brian!

Special guest: Chow Yun-fat