After winning the "Best Screenplay" in Cannes last year, "Driving My Car" was shortlisted for four awards at this year's Oscars, including "Best Adapted Screenplay". Some netizens directly called out that director Ryusuke Hamaguchi is "the best gift from Asian films to the world in recent years".
In fact, script writing and adaptation have always been Hamaguchi's strong points. The three short stories of "Chance and Imagination" reveal the subtlety and romance of East Asian narratives. The original work of "Night and Day", "Sleep or Wake Up", is at best a melodrama novel, but Hamaguchi has filmed the ghostly phantom of urban love.
Based on the Japanese best-selling author Haruki Murakami's "Men Without Women" and incorporating the philosophy of Chekhov's "Uncle Vanya", what is the magic of Hamakul's adaptation?
A captivating narrative intertwined with multiple texts
Whether it's using inexperienced actors, rehearsing in theater, or adding "play-in-play" to the film, drama has always been a very important element in Hamaguchi's work.
It is not difficult to understand Hamaguchi's surprise at Murakami's intertextual Chekhov.
In Chekhov's script, Uncle Vanya is a tragic character who wastes his life admiring and disillusionment with others. The original work has almost a few brush strokes on "Uncle Vanya", and Hamaguchi has set up a large number of drama scenes in the film. The arc of Jiafu's role is paved with the transfer and transfer of the role of Uncle Vanya as a bridge.
In the process of playing Uncle Vanya at the beginning, Jiafu's psychological state is obscured, and those lines about loyalty and stealing love go in and out of his mouth, but he does not want to and does not want to stay carefully. Just as he was silent in the face of his wife's bold and almost ostentatious derailment, pretending not to see it.
After the death of his wife, Uncle Vanya became a retributive tool of scrutiny and hatred. Jiafu no longer plays him, he directs him. He chose his deceased wife's lover, Takatsuki, as his new actor, and examined Takatsuki through the character's own experience, forcing him to show his horse's feet and fall into moral difficulties.
But this persecution did not succeed. Chekhov talked about the collapse of spiritual beliefs, and after the collapse, we should turn our eyes to ourselves. If God is dead, then all we can rely on is ourselves, and it is delusional to try to obtain proof of our standing in others.
Therefore, the role of Uncle Vanya must and can only be played by Jiafu in the end. So Takatsuki was designed as a young man who could not control the violence and relied on instinct, and after killing someone by mistake, Takatsuki went down, and After several entanglements, Hefu decided to perform on stage. This time, he had to be honest with the character and himself.
Murakami's original work is actually very short, and the character of Yin also adds the setting of Murakami's other work, "Yamaruzod": a woman who likes to tell stories when she is in love. And it's a strange, even somewhat frightening story. In addition, through the recorded tape, the sound participated in the whole story with a ghostly presence. All this casts a layer of mystery on the sound that cannot be extinguished.
There is another very interesting detail about the narrative charm of this multi-text interweaving. After encountering his wife's blatant infidelity, Jiafu dropped eye drops to prevent glaucoma in his red car, and then a tear fell. But we can't say whether it's real or fake.
The car as a narrative space
Haruki Murakami has a crush on cars, and there's no doubt about it. Everyone says that men who don't have a car in middle age will be sad. Unsatisfactory work, the family's trivial skin, can only be slightly resolved in a small car, with a chinese seed.
Hamaguchi faithfully demonstrates the importance of the car to the family. His red sedan also underwent three changes in function: a private space — a space for communication, a space for dialogue — a space for new, narrative subjects outside the story.
This functional change also corresponds to the change in the psychological state of the characters.
When the car is used as a private space, the family is closed, and he is immersed in the victim mentality: as a husband, I have done a good job, why does the wife still betray me again and again?
When a person presents himself as a victim, it is often difficult to look at his surroundings and himself from a more objective perspective, and it is difficult to understand what is happening.
At this time, in the eyes of Jiafu, the world was only the size of a car. He was unwilling and unable to understand the reason for his wife's betrayal, he just wanted to stay in the car, digest, taste, and indulge in his own sadness.
And when Jiafu's closed state is broken, that is, after Tori as his driver breaks into his life, the truth gradually appears - Yin has been immersed in the pain of losing his daughter, and Jiafu responds to this by doing nothing, it is nothing happening, which has become the wall between him and Yin.
At this time, the car is already a state of gradual opening, which can not only accommodate Watoshi, a girl who also has her own sad story, but also include Takatsuki, the lover of the sound, and the theater manager.
In this semi-open space, Jiafu can both preserve his own space (sitting in the back seat and listening to the tapes recorded by the music) and the opportunity to talk to others and contemplate himself in the mirror of others.
At the end of the film, instead of Jiafu driving a red car, it is Dori, a girl who can also be the heroine of a movie, driving her car and continuing on the road. At this time, the car driving into the distance implies that in addition to the story, a new story also begins to play out.
Functional others
Some people also say that "Driving My Car" is not a relatively good work of Hamaguchi, because the secondary characters in it are no longer "on their own", but more of a function that forces the protagonist to grow, that is, "tool man".
Regardless of whether this is true, as a work that carries the three most stylistic authors of Haruki Murakami, Chekhov and Hamakul, this is not a good choice. After all, we can't ask Hamaguchi to completely divide the style that originally allowed the characters to grow freely, Murakami's narcissism, and Chekhov's criticism completely into three equal parts.
In any case, these persecutions from others also entered the audience's heart.
The first time I pressed the question, it was Yin who wanted to talk to Jiafu before she died. The narrative moves forward and we look forward to seeing the relationship break down. But this rupture was first carried out by Jiafu.
Psychologically, there is an avoidant personality, and their handling of interpersonal conflicts often ends the relationship with a posture of breaking the can first. Jiafu's delay in returning home is also a refusal to have an in-depth exchange with Yin. Later, the sudden death of Yin directly declared that communication was no longer possible.
In this way, the small episode of Jiafu's eye injury caused by a car accident is also a metaphor.
The second time he pressed the question, Takatsuki, the lover from the sound. Perhaps out of revenge, Iefu borrowed the role of director and the role of Vanya's uncle to make Takatsuki, who is far away from the role, feel self-doubting.
But in the process, Jiafu is also constantly frustrated, and Takatsuki does not seem to feel guilty about The immoral relationship with Kazune? Is the problem really with Takatsuki?
Until Takatsuki said an earth-shattering line in the original work, the hunt finally ended, but the hunter became the prey: "Jiafu, even if it is the object of love, wants to fully spy on each other, such a pursuit can only end up in their own pain." If you really want to spy on others, you can only look at yourself deeply and directly. ”
The third question from Dori was already very blunt: "Don't mystify your wife anymore, is it difficult?" ”
Stop thinking of Yin as an incomprehensible other, her infidelity again and again, the strange stories she tells when she makes love to you, are not incomprehensible myths.
As long as you dare, as long as you dare to bravely look directly at yourself, and look directly at yourself, you have not dared to face the pain of losing your daughter and the pain of your wife, the truth of "life is difficult" is in front of you.
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