September 23, 2021 12:58 pm
The silhouette of a woman emerges almost majestic, filmed against the light against the background of a large window from which the dim light of dawn emerges (but also of twilight: it is a reversible, cyclical and dual image, like everything here). It seems a goddess, or a shadow, the shadow queen of the kingdom of shadows. It is the mysterious and enveloping beginning of Drive my car, the film that the Japanese director Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, 40, based on the story of the same name by the writer Haruki Murakami contained in the collection [Uomini senza donne](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uomini_senza_donne_(raccolta_di_racconti).
Awarded for the best screenplay at the last Cannes Film Festival, despite considering the rich selection, it would have deserved the Palme d’Or also because it would have launched with greater force a great director of which Tucker film is now courageously bringing two films to theaters: The game of fate and fantasy, awarded this year in Berlin with the Silver Bear and already released on August 26, e Drive my car in addition to directing, he also wrote the co-script.
A woman adored and revered by her husband, actor and theater director, records the tapes with the lines of the room which the husband must interpret and which the latter listens to in the car. Instead, she, a screenwriter for TV series, tells him strange tales at night or, more often, in the passage between night and day, which she later forgets but which her husband memorizes allowing him to give them concrete form. This amnesia of his, this feeble nocturnal creativity that dissolves with the daylight, has its origin in a great pain that the film will gradually reveal, almost with subdued modesty. But suddenly this woman is gone, leaving the man as empty. A couple of years later we see him traveling to Hiroshima, a city symbol of pain and memory, to direct one room theatrical taken from Zio Vanja by Chekhov. The film (re) begins here, as if it were a second life, and finally the opening credits appear.
The memory of cinema
In Hagamuchi’s work, which already boasts a dozen feature films, albeit without ever being a citationist, the memory of cinema is fundamental, of course Japanese, but also European and above all American. In particular, the cinema of John Cassavetes, decisive for his formation, starting with the film Husbands (Husbands, 1970). However, his lesson is reworked in a very personal form. He also follows the movement of the actors, trying to bring out their feelings through their faces and their gestures, in a natural way, almost without directing them. On the other hand, the dialogues are very written, subtle and contain within them the elements of the psychological description of the characters, while being both realistic and an expression of concrete reality.
But there is also a lot of direction, and if from Cassavetes (and many Japanese or Hollywood films), he learned how the chaining of the frames gives an extraordinary effect to the cinema, there is an elegance, at times a sinuosity mixed with a sort of composure, in the editing, in the shots and in the camera movements, which is all oriental. And if here the theater is central, it is clear the reference, once again, to Cassavetes, whose work and career are characterized by the theater.
Following the actors in their movement was especially true in Happy hour, presented in competition in Locarno in 2015 where it won a special mention for the screenplay and the Pardo for best female interpretation, made with non-professional interpreters. Object of infinite drafts in the screenplay, even when the shooting was already in progress, to avoid too complex steps for non-professional actresses (and actors), explicit perhaps better than other titles as the woman is absolutely central in Hamaguchi’s cinema. The director investigates the slightest, imperceptible tremors inherent in larger movements. The small signs hidden in the large ones, the minimal gestures hidden in the more extensive and evident ones.
A perfect example is The game of fate and fantasy, three female stories that build a unique and only apparently episodic movement. Written, directed and edited by Hamaguchi, it is a wonderful film for its humanistic charge even when, at times, it presents cynical or provocative moments, very enjoyable for its lightness and depth in dissecting human behavior and psychology, it recalls in some ways the cinema of Eric Rohmer , already central to the cinema of another great contemporary director from the Far East, unfortunately still little known to us: the South Korean Hong Sang-soo, steeped in French culture.
In Hamaguchi’s cinema the investigation of the intimate is directly connected to that of the social
Having written it in first person, derogating from the almost productive dictatorship that in Japan obliges to adapt successful novels for the big screen, demonstrates the director’s sure talent in writing as well as the incredible ability to make actors arise, as if it were magic, ” the right time in a natural way. And, after all, what is the title of the first episode-movement? Magic (or something less reassuring).
In Drive my car there is explicitly such a moment, when the actor-director for the rehearsals of the room he works outdoors with his diverse group of actors. In a completely symbolic way, it is a moment in which many of the founding elements of Hamaguchi’s cinema that dominate his work in a pervasive way crystallize. The search for the invisible, communication (words, gestures, facial expressions), oppositions linked within.
Go towards the other and the truth
The latter are hardly able to come out, so strong is the custom of expressing opinions and feelings on the facade in Japan, a salient aspect of Japanese society that haunts the director. Because in Hamaguchi’s cinema the investigation of the intimate is directly connected to that of the social. Here, communicating means going towards the other and towards the truth as if they were one, indissoluble thing, and therefore also towards an invisible dimension that envelops and permeates us all without distinction. Hamaguchi, a humanistic and cosmopolitan author, always tends towards this, already in Happy hour it linked all the characters to each other.
The fact that the room by Chekhov at the request of the Hiroshima festival is to be performed in several languages of the area but also in the West (the translation of the text for the public is entrusted to an electronic screen), and by often local actors and actresses, it means this: that despite the babel of languages counts how it is said more than what it is said, the gestures beyond the visible count, the soul common to all. Paradigma is the mute South Korean wife of the assistant director who plays in room with sign language. In other words, we are all a single organism inextricably united in a single movement. On the other hand, almost all of the director’s films are impressive to each other.
Interclass mirror
In this film of memory, the actor-director will understand this by binding a deep friendship, despite his all male prejudices, with the very efficient and young driver in charge of driving his car during the festival. This creates a sort of three-way symbiosis including, that is, the memory of the wife who lives through her cassettes and almost inhabits the postmortem auto. A woman who carries with her great pain, great remorse, a scar both physical and internal, and who finds her mirror in this mature man, an interclass mirror, since she is a poor woman of humble origins. As in Cassavetes, for example that of the debut masterpiece by Shadow (1960), they are all united also in disorientation, indeed we could say in existential dislocation, since they are all interchangeable, just like the roles of room they are reassigned unexpectedly by the protagonist and by chance.
On the other hand, with the shadows it opens up Drive my car. And with the stories told in the shadows. “Each time the girl secretly penetrates the boy’s room and takes something out of her room. And in return she leaves a mark ”is one of the stories of the deceased wife. Small signs, but strong. Signs of unrequited or secret or one-sided love affairs. Signs of the desire for another life as well as for another life: “One day he remembers his previous life where he was a lamprey”, his wife will say again in her vital movement of creative onanism.
But if here the story develops during sexual intercourse between night and day, the sensual oneirism of the word is strong also in the second story of The game of fate and fantasy in which a successful writer is captivated by the fan, by “his ability to be indescribable and to remain indefinite”, while he recites the most risque passages of his text and (almost) everything remains delicate and modest. And it is a collapse of the facade of the dialogues of appearance that provokes the last episode of the film, the most beautiful, about an equivocal and at the same time reciprocated lesbian love in the most unexpected way, and in which the masculine woman is out of sync with the environment social has more than one correspondence with the woman’s driver Drive my car.
Everything is linked, because we are all linked in a single movement. Indeed, in a single dance, as in Cassavetes. And of which the ending of Drive my car, among the most beautiful seen at the cinema in recent years, is the silent and moving gloss.
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