The Japanese writer – Director of Ryusuke Hamaguchi took a relaxing road. Along the highway of love and lunch losses, grieving and healing in his latest Cannes competition, drive my car.
Adapted from a short story with the same name by Japanese writer Global Haruki Murakami. The film Highbrow Road is a work that absorbs, technically guaranteed with poetic depth and novelistic ambition.
But it is also prolonged and heavy, motorized along with the low gear for most of the three-hour runtime.
The Lethargic Pace is underlined when a satisfactory opening credit. Finally appears almost 40 minutes in the story. The past is a prologue, even though it feels like half a film. Given the loss of the Marukami to operate the Beatles song title. Driving my car may be equally called a long and winding road.
Hamaguchi last competed in Cannes three years ago with a romantic fairy tale, Asako I & II. Which was prime for generally an excellent review. But his reputation has since recovered, writing with the wife of Thriller Kiyoshi Kurasawa.
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Luck and fantasy. It was established at the home festival and art hearings. Drive my car’s cement reputation. That is aquatic as a skilled auteur. However, it was impossible to give him an invitation to direct the subsequent increase quickly and an angry blockbuster.
While drive my car is loyal to the minimal Murakami original text. Hamaguchi has expanded the timeline, adding additional locations, secondary characters, deeper backstory and stabbing dramatic resolution. Taking his signal from the brief reference Murakami to Uncle Vanya.
He also lifted Chekhov’s Mirancholy Stage Classif into a recurring motive. Repeatedly returned to Sonya’s cover speech about the need to record disappointment. As a hurt protagonist Hamaguchi began their emotional journey, this theme resonates with increasing urgency.
Located in Tokyo, the first action is Mandiri’s domestic tragedy.
The kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is an internationally recognized stage. And theatre actor understood by Chekhov and Beckett Productions. He enjoyed a deep and passionate relationship with the wife of the auto scenario writer (Reika Kirishima). She shares the plot idea that is half a high dreamed. With him during a s*x session that sensually presented.
The couple had survived the personal disaster, the death of their only daughter 20 years before. Plus minor medical problems. Including glaucoma of kafuku that is recently diagnosed. This literal “blind point” served the purpose of metaphor in the narrative. When the kafuku returned to the house unexpectedly one day.
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To find the auto having s*x with one of his actor’s colleagues. A handsome hothead Koshi (Masaki Okada). Tucking without service, the kafuku then hurts. Whether to arouse the subject with his wife, avoid apparent efforts to clean the air. Before any resolution was possible, the auto suddenly died, took his secret to the cemetery.
Two years later, my kafuku worked at the Theater Festival in Hiroshima:
Directed the ambitious polyglot production of Uncle Vanya. The players will display Japanese, Chinese and Korean actors who speak many languages, including sign language. But veteran actors refused to repeat the role of Vanya himself, afraid of emotional exposure. “Chekhov is scary,” argued, “it dragged you the truth.”
The rules of the Festival Insurance Mean Kafuku must be reluctant to submit. The Vintage Red Vintage Saab car to the driver. A young woman who was surly, taciturn, a smoking chain on the way from its traumatic family history.
Their long drive around Hiroshima slowly evolved from formal exchanges for painful and honest recognition. The theme of foreigners who share the secret of the tender present in the original story of the Murakami.
But also in Hamaguchi films before, especially the wheel of luck. As Director stated in his Cannes press notes, cars such as the neutral emotional buffer zone pushed Frank’s revelation. “Intimate conversation that was only born in the closed moving room.”
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Unexpected arrivals in the Vanya Casting Uncle session were former Oto Koshi lovers. Recently stopped his career as a TV pan under the scandalous cloud. He and my kafuku formed an awkward Camaraderie. Tied their love to the same woman without ever touching an affair: “I believe the Oto unites us,” Koshi’s claim.
