RELATED:‘Drive My Car’: Best Picture Nominee to Premiere on HBO Max in March
Drive My Carhas become a major player at the upcoming 94thAcademy Awards,with some pundits speculating that it’s a frontrunner for Best International Feature. Not only is Hamaguchi’s film up for Best Director and Best Screenplay, it’s also the first Japanese motion picture in history to merit inclusion in the Oscar’s Best Picture category (an injustice, certainly, but that is a point best saved for another piece). The rich irony of all this, of course, is thatDrive My Caris an intimately epic work of human-scaled portraiture: in other words, the furthest thing possible from Oscar bait. The film has reached a surprisingly wide audience, for being as unapologetically methodical and patient as it ultimately is. This languor ends up working in the film’s favor, sinceDrive My Car, like all Hamaguchi films, deals in the unspoken minutiae of what makes us all human.
In broad terms,Drive My Caris the portrait of a mourning man who uses a famous stage play,Uncle Vanya, to work through his grief. It is also the story of a younger woman that the mourning man befriends: a driver, as it were, who is shouldering her own form of loss. Critics and audiences have responded with overwhelming enthusiasm to the humane classicism ofDrive My Car: it enjoys a 98% freshness score on Rotten Tomatoes, with an equally impressive 91% on Metacritic (the film also landed on more than a few end-of-year Top 10 lists from venerated critics).
In spite of all the success that his movie film has enjoyed, it would be misleading to call Mr. Hamaguchi an overnight success. The man has been at it, working hard and making intelligent, challenging films since the mid-to-late 2000’s to today. If you’ve just caughtDrive My Carand aren’t sure where to start with the rest of the director’s outstanding filmography, here are three of our favorite Ryusuke Hamaguchi works to get you started.
Happy Hour
It feels safe to say that Hamaguchi came to the attention of many cinephiles with the release of 2015’s sprawling humanist drama,Happy Hour. Born out of acting workshops and a meticulous, thoughtful rehearsal process,Happy Hour,which clocks in at a whopping 317 minutes,is an even longer sit than the three-hourDrive My Car. Don’t let the five-hour plus runtime put you off, though: as always, there is a highly deliberate method at play here, and viewers' patience will not only be rewarded, but paid back in spades. Besides, it’s not cheating to watch the film over the course of several days, almost the way you should a television show (some of us have jobs, after all).
Happy Hour, more than many other films you’ll see in your lifetime, feels as though it is unfolding in real time, not movie-time. It is the study of a group of female friends in their 30s. It reflects on the desires of these women, their love lives, their days off, their brushes with divorce, heartbreak, and trauma, and above all else, their kinship with one other. The film is demanding purely in terms of its duration, yes, but if you surrender to its serene rhythms, it possesses a kind of hypnotic power. By the timeHappy Hourfinally arrives at its lovely conclusion, you come to feel as though you know this group of characters on a level that’s somehow bone-deep.
Asako I & II
Hamaguchi’s star on the arthouse film circuit continued to rise when he released the eerily potent lost-love storyAsako I & II,which is a must-watch for those who were transfixed by the heartsick existential blues ofDrive My Car. Hamaguchi’s most overtly romantic work is about a young woman who experiences love at first sight almost as swiftly as she loses it. Later, she will fall for a different man who just so happens to look exactly like her forgotten paramour. It’s an ever-so-slightly uncanny gimmick played with the utmost seriousness. In the end,Asakois a story of how we often unwittingly project feelings of love unto others, and how some of us are always searching for an ideal that remains forever out of reach.
With this tender and startling minimalist tone poem, Hamaguchi displayed a novelist’s curiosity about the inner lives of his characters. He wants to know about their dreams, their inadequacies, what they yearn for, and more to the point, how they project that yearning onto strangers. As an artist, Hamaguchi’s preferred subject is human connection: both why we seek it, and why we sometimes run away from it. He is an undeniable formalist who often leads with his pure, but mischievous heart. Simply put, the man is doing things with structure, in all of his films, that few other working directors are even attempting, let alone succeeding at.
Wheel of Fortune And Fantasy
As a storyteller, Hamaguchi understands that so much of life occurs in the mundane, in-between moments of one’s day. This motif is the focus of the director’sotherfeature from 2021, the beguilingWheel of Fortune And Fantasy.LikeWes Anderson’sThe French Dispatch, Hamaguchi’s film is a triptych of tales, related to each other mostly by a larger formal structure. In this contemplative and deceptively probing gem, a kind of cinematic short-story collection, Hamaguchi maintains his abiding fascination with the masks that people wear to get through the day, and what happens when someone clocks that mask for the façade that it is and sees the real you underneath it all.
Wheel’sfirst story, “Magic (Or Something Less Assuring),” establishes the enchanting, meditative, ever-so-slightly magical-realist tone. Two friends sit in the back of a taxicab, discussing a man that one is smitten with. What unfolds along with the introduction of an ex-boyfriend sees the director setting the stage for a shrewdly observed tete-a-tete in which formers lovers and friends work through buried resentments. The second story, “Door Wide Open,” offers some of the most riveting writing and directing of the year you’ll see in a film from 2021: it’s the story of a female college student and a conniving male classmate interested in “trapping” a controversial academic whose explicit books may or may not conceal a streak of perverse personal behavior. “Once Again,” the final story, is a heartfelt consideration of mistaken identity, and a tribute to seeking out everyday magic. In its own inauspicious way,Wheel of Fortune and Fantasyoffers its own form of everyday magic, hiding just out of plain sight.
There is no definitive word right now on what Hamaguchi’s next directorial move will be (recently, he sat on the jury for this year’s Berlin Film Festival, along withM. Night Shyamalan). In fact, it feels almost fruitless to speculate as to where he might go next. After decades of sticking to his guns and making the exact kinds of gentle, artful, unbelievably observant movies that he wanted to make, the world has finally caught up to Ryusuke Hamaguchi. We really should be grateful to experience a cinematic landscape in which films this wonderful are being made at all.
Drive My Caris that rare arthouse film that successfully crossed over to the mainstream without any concessions to what some might deem to be commercial storytelling. It is an exciting new beginning to a remarkable phase in the career of one of our most talented contemporary directors. The best part is that it seems as though Hamaguchi is only getting started.
