The author | Wu Jiarui
At the 74th Cannes Film Festival, newcomer director Ryusuke Hamaguchi won the Best Screenplay Award for "Driving My Car", and won several awards including Best Picture, Best Actor, Best Director and Best Screenplay in January this year, and was shortlisted for this year's Oscar Nomination list for Best Director.
"Driving My Car" has also become a highly discussed Asian film this year. In fact, the plot itself is not complicated, roughly speaking, it is a story of a stage director who pushed his heart with his driver after the death of his wife, adapted from Haruki Murakami's short story "Men Without Women". The original book is only 40 pages, but it is 3 hours long after the film. It can be seen that this is not a remake in the traditional sense.
As a stylized newcomer director, Ryusuke Hamaguchi is very good at tapping into humanity in ordinary life. The content is "simple", that is, deepening the emotion by weakening a certain plot. This is also why most Asian directors are good at using the "documentary" method to break up and rebuild things that are usually commonplace, and then induce the audience to think deeper.
In "Drive My Car", the most brilliant thing is the mastery of structure. Using the car as a carrier to pull out a detailed net, most of the dialogue and plot advancement in the film is completed in this small and closed space.
Roughly can be divided into two parts, one is between the wife, jiafu and his wife have been living a life of separation, even if they witness the wife and the drama actor cheating, jiafu can also be when nothing happened, the two people have a few conversations in this car around the drama, in addition to the two exchanges are very little.
Until the death of his wife, the whole film opens another part, that is, emotional deepening, but the object is another woman, the driver of the family fortune, Dori. At first, Jiafu and the driver Dori do not have any dialogue, and the only connection between the two is the tape of his late wife playing on a loop in the car.
However, the two people have the same broken souls, and the tragic life experience of Dori is to some extent interconnected with the family blessing. As the plot progresses, both people finally accept themselves and achieve liberation.
The stage play "Vanya's Uncle" occupies a large part of the length of the film, and here involves another character - Takatsuki. He is an important figure between Jiafu and his wife, and an actor in "Vanya's Uncle". With the psychology of scrutiny and revenge, Jiafu assigns Takatsuki a "self-destructive" character, which is also the part of the stage play that switches back and forth between true and false.
This kind of nested play-within-play is used repeatedly, just right to put the characters and the drama in the same space for discussion and verification, in the stage play "Vanya's Uncle" the actors use different national languages to interpret, and even use sign language, which looks like self-talk, but in fact, it establishes a "critical state" between performance and reality, and the psychology of the characters inside and outside the play is "stealing beams and changing pillars", presented in the way of the male protagonist's voiceover.
In the process of promoting the stage play, Jiafu's state of mind has also been subtly changed, from several exchanges with Takatsuki, the image of his wife has gradually become plump, and jiafu has gradually realized the crux of his and his wife, and it is his blind avoidance that has lengthened the gap between his feelings with his wife. These seemingly unrelated fragments are interspersed throughout the film, like a huge interweaving of dreams and reality.
Most of the characters constructed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi are expressionless and wooden, often not revealing real emotions, which is also a very interesting point, the audience can speculate on the psychological state of the protagonist according to the image given by the director, this semi-subjective way is often more convincing.
In other words, hide the clues in the details, let the audience feel the inner world of the characters, and thus promote the direction of the film. This is more interesting than injecting elements such as music and lines at the right time.
Overall, it was a successful remake that both guaranteed Haruki Murakami's concise narrative style and made bold innovations. Although it is 180 minutes long, the content is scattered but not loose, and literature and image coexist on a certain level.
It is a good idea to predict that in the next few years, Hamaguchi Ryusuke will most likely become a new generation of "symbolic" directors in Japan.