Learning to Drive

I only met uncle Jacques once. We were in Bathurst, on the shores of Atlantic New Brunswick. He had just left his second wife to get back together with his first. He was a fisherman. Our interactions were infrequent, unremarkable, and bordered on uncomfortable. But he told the tale of his last few months, and I was attentive. I was in Gaspé and drove straight down to Montréal, he said. An eight-hour trip, eyes on the road, lost in a dizzy focus. Beyond the destination, there was another. I drove to clear my head, to guide myself and stay on my tracks. When you drive, you’re forced to stay within your lane. Bound by a set of rules, confined to pre-existing models. Resisting, at all times, the call of the void. To steer off in one direction or another. I may have been paraphrasing – he did only speak French, after all. But I remember that metaphor still, as it finds its way back to me staring out the passenger seat window. As I am stopped at a red. As I turn at a bend. And it came to me yesterday, as I lived the near three hours of Drive My Car, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s latest feature.

Drive My Car is difficult to describe, much less critique. It is simple enough to leave the theater with a sense that nothing of real importance took place. No blockbuster moments, explosions, open questions about the nature of it all and the human condition, obvious coming of age adventures. The entire affair was oddly human, without a hint of mundanity. If we see ourselves within the story, we often tend to dismiss it. After all, we usually don’t consider ourselves or our lives worthy movie material.

The mumbled criticisms of chatty couples and popcorn poppers wishing they had paid closer attention to runtime, the silent patron-of-the-arts grandmothers already looking towards their next piece, the regular. Me, slumped in my seat anxiously waiting to be the last to leave, thinking to myself that this may just have been the most important movie I have seen yet.

Really, none and all of these reactions are fair. Drive My Car is complex in its simplicity, a fact that tends to anger casual and seasoned movie-goers alike. It cannot be critiqued as much as it can be lived and taken into a part of oneself, I think. To glimpse into the life of a 50-some year old director and actor and find oneself – worries and joys, grief and novelty, constance and flux, and all – is no diminishing feat.

This movie is a story of pacing. It is a story of stories, carrying us through our own. The screenwriter producing her stories on the brink of orgasm. The husband hiding the truth from himself by driving too late. The play they must put on. The guilt and consequences of fame. The abusive mother and her constructed alter ego which was made to provide the kind of unconditional love children are promised. The movie itself. As the applause rain down near the end of the final act, we begin to question our own intentions, as consumers of art. Having seen the proverbial sausage being made, how can we better interpret the stories which we are confronted with. Not only those presented to us neatly bundled and ripe for our enjoyment, but also and especially the stories we tell ourselves. How we see the world. The truth and lies, subjects of our imagination. In reality, it is never as good or as bad as one thinks. Perhaps this story could have been told in an hour. But if telling implies someone listening, it couldn’t possibly have been told in fewer than three hours. The writers must have known, just as all good drivers do, that we may not pass the speed limit.

The charcters are cold, yet relatable and raw. They are civilized, well dressed and polite. They tend to keep to themselves, which makes their shared catharthis much greater when it eventually comes to pass. Within them and their connections I saw my father, I saw the vision of my sister through my mother’s eyes, I saw faces of myself and friends I remember. I saw, perhaps, all of the lives which I never layed eyes upon. The blind and the deaf, poor and poorer, artist and criminal. More than a duality. There is life in this movie. Grayness and multitude from start to finish, never tending towards black or white. Long silences matched by longer monologues. Dogs, adultery, music, stillness, violence, trust all in the same place, at the same time. The silence of the road at night. The bustle of a pistol shot, a sudden car crash. Stories within stories which never end. Because they don’t have an ending. The writer is dead, the reader imprisonned and yet the story lives on, invisible, underneath it all. The warm coddle of truth. No matter what it is, it can’t be that frightening.

Drive My Car is close to home. It is a world away. It is doesn’t walk a dichotomic, good versus evil line. Its compassion reaches out, takes you in and reassures you, the viewer, that there is indeed no reassurance beyond the sheer absurdity of living, the unavoidable sense in death. It grows on you. It opens you up. It leaves you with an overwhelming feeling that you are not alone. You are lost in it, time for you is replaced by a series of successive images, paced to perfection so as to draw attention away from itself. Within it, I found the mutlitude of art. And in fact, I don’t know much about it. I felt beautifully lost, not looking to be found but instead relishing the unknown. There is little more I can say and say again about Drive My Car. It is unknowable. It has no goal. It means nothing. It holds everything. It is life in three hours.

$lpbg$