Drive My Car
I like to think the euphoric standing ovation Ryûsuke Hamaguchi received after the Cannes premiere of his Drive My Car makes up for the one he never got for Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, unveiled last February at the online-only Berlinale. In the space of five months, the Japanese director has delivered two luminous gems, and his latest is the second adaptation of a Haruki Murakami text to be unveiled in the official competition since Lee Chang-dong’s Burning in 2018. It is based on Murakami’s novella of the same name (available in the English-speaking world in the short stories collection Men Without Women). In it, a theatre actor and director agrees to helm a production of Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya at a festival in Hiroshima, all while struggling to overcome the death of his wife, who passed away two years prior.
The actor-cum-director is Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima). He drives a crimson Saab 900 which he seems to regard less as a vehicle than a protective capsule, a moveable shield inside which he plays recordings of his late wife reading all but one of the parts in Uncle Vanya—leaving Yusuke to fill in the gaps and rehearse his lines in the title role. But once he arrives in Hiroshima, the festival’s insurance policies dictate he must hand over the keys to a chauffeur hired to drive him around for the whole sojourn. That would be Misaki (Tôko Miura), a taciturn twenty-something who mourns a personal loss of her own. And so Drive My Car swells from a road movie into a late-night confessional; slowly, the silence between the two strangers thaws into a strange kind of bond rooted in a history of shared traumas, with the two gingerly parceling out secrets and regrets on their way to and fro the theatre. It’s a nocturnal reverie, a film of fulminating, incandescent exchanges, made all the more gripping by Nishijima and Miura’s implosive performances.
Yusuke has made a name for himself thanks to his multilingual productions, which leave those on stage to speak in their native tongues, and audiences to follow via subtitles screened in real time. The actors often do not understand each other and the casting of a mute South Korean woman, who’s to star in Uncle Vanya and communicate through sign language, only heightens the barriers. But to Yusuke—and Hamaguchi—these aren’t obstacles so much as catalysts that wring out a type of emotional truth, which turns Drive My Car into a study in the way art can act as a universal idiom to unlock and exorcise one’s suffering. This is what the film nails with extraordinary perceptiveness. It’s about the mix of exhilaration and terror that comes from surrendering yourself to a work of art and in turn unveiling things you've tucked deep within. Indeed, one of the many pleasures in Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe’s script is to hear characters open up about what Chekhov’s play means to them. This makes for contrasting takes on the reactions amongst those who tackle Uncle Vanya. “Chekhov’s text moves inside my body, which was stuck before” a character muses halfway through the rehearsals, but it’s in Yusuke’s confessions that Drive My Car tips its hand. He finds Chekhov terrifying for the very same effect he hopes the text will elicit in his cast: “when you say his lines, he drags out the real you.”
Hamaguchi is no stranger to sprawling, epic-size works; to my knowledge, at three hours, Drive My Car is his second-longest film after his 2015 five-hour Happy Hour. But the film saunters along so effortlessly that time just flows by, and the conversations—long and cerebral as they may be at times—are always grounded in a sense of urgency, always orphaned by real, tangible sorrow. Halfway through a festival like Cannes, trudging along at a gargantuan three-or-four-movie a day pace, it can be difficult to find a film that commands your attention with such unhinged force, but here’s one that’s jostled itself in my mind in a way no other has so far, the sort of revelation worth the whole trip alone.
Bergman Island
I left Hamaguchi’s premiere nursing a déjà-vu. After Nadav Lapid’s Ahed’s Knee and Joanna Hogg’s The Souvenir Part II, Drive My Car joined a growing contingent of films interrogating the very meaning of filmmaking—films that question why we make films, and who we make them for. These questions ricochet everywhere in Mia Hansen-Løve’s official competition entry Bergman Island, where a couple of filmmakers (Tim Roth’s Tony and Vicky Krieps’s Chris) travel to Färo—the Swedish island where Ingmar Bergman lived and worked for over forty years—for an artist's residency. As written by Hansen-Løve, once again performing writer-director duty, their relationship couldn’t be any less symmetrical: Tony is a cocksure and accomplished director immune to self-doubt, Chris a filmmaker with far less clout and far less confidence, unsure in what her craft amounts to or where it will take her. For a while Bergman Island follows the two as they set camp in the island and wrestle with their respective scripts while trying hard to ignore the fact that they’re working in Bergman’s own turf (a desecration whose scope Chris spells out with a candid “writing here, I feel like a loser”).
And indeed, there’s no escaping Bergman’s ghost. From the guided tours around the master’s house, his haunts, his film locations, Hansen-Løve pays homage to the director while also satirizing the commodification of his home and oeuvre into a tourist Mecca (believe it or not, there’s a "Bergman Safari" bus that promises to shuttle you around the island…). Even the harp melodies disseminated throughout echo Bergman’s own soundscapes, and it’s hard to watch Chris tiptoe around tidal pools without being jolted back to Summer with Monika (one of many, many Bergman titles mentioned here). But Bergman Island is not an exercise in cinephilia, a game of name-dropping. Nor does it ever ape the Swede’s cinema. Bergman is talked over at length, but he’s dissed (mostly by locals) and praised (mostly by tourists) in equal measure. His phantom hovers above the film less as its raison d’être than an entry point into Chris’s creative and existential crises. Why did the man never explore happiness? And how should we feel about his forsaking a family for art?
I can’t pretend I wasn’t intrigued by some of the dilemmas Chris wrestles with, and Krieps' performance is compelling enough for Chris’s bouts of self-doubt to still feel airy and light. But as the film moved along, I began to wonder whether it’d ever really diverge from what eventually boiled down to a study of creative impasse? It's beautifully shot (cinematographer Denis Lenoir nails some stunning golden hour shots, gracing the barren coastline with an elemental grace) but perhaps less incisive and emotionally involving as other portraits of its kind. And yet, just as the couple’s exchanges threaten to lose momentum, Chris has a creative breakthrough. She tells Tony about a new idea for a film she wants to set in Färo, where a young director (Mia Wasikowska’s Amy) bumps into an old flame (Anders Danielsen Lie’s Joseph) at a wedding held on the island, and their romance flares up again.
It is here that Bergman Island splinters into two storylines running parallel to each other, and Wasikowska’s rekindled romance lifts the film onto a territory reminiscent of Richard Linklater’s Before trilogy: a love story with a looming deadline where every gesture and every glance double as a farewell. Not only is the film-within-the-film a far more riveting storyline than Chris’s own; it also ends up strengthening, as if by osmosis, all that came before, imbuing Chris’s artistic and existential travails with renewed oomph and tension. Bergman Island may not be up there with some of Mia Hansen-Løve’s finest, but it is still a subtle, piercing study of an artistic awakening, of the incommensurable gap between our real-life experiences and how we resurrect them in the stories we tell. Perhaps the fact that I found myself more invested in Amy’s struggles rather than Chris’s only reinforces the argument Bergman Island’s gestures towards: the idea that art can yield a kind of power and lyricism life will never match.
The French Dispatch
Which brings us to The French Dispatch. It’s been almost a decade since Wes Anderson was last seen in Cannes (his Moonrise Kingdom opened the fest in 2012), and his latest had already been promised a slate in the official competition before the pandemic broke out. It’s an anthology film, unfurling like the last issue of the magazine it’s named after with an obituary, a travelogue, and three feature stories. And it is packed with virtually every familiar face in the director’s canon, plus a handful of new ones (most notable, perhaps, is the inclusion of Timothee Chalamet as a student revolutionary and chess prodigy Zeffirelli, Benicio del Toro as an Ai Wei-Wei looking artist/prisoner, and Jeffrey Wright as a journalist with a Truman Capote-esque ability to remember everything he has ever written). This naturally means that, while some actors are given ample screen time, others don't fare as well; by my notes, Edward Norton may only have a line or two, and Saoirse Ronan doesn’t do much better. Yet the cramming and overstuffing extends to more than just the cast.
“Recover” isn’t a word I thought I’d ever use associate with a Wes Anderson joint, but The French Dispatch left me with a sensory overdose so strong I often found myself struggling to keep up with all that was flashing before my eyes. Only a few seconds in and the film treats us to a showcase of Anderson’s trademarked grammar: an exquisite sense of color, Piero della Francesca-like symmetries, a recurrent use of voiceover, dazzling camera movements. Which is another way of saying that The French Dispatch is very Wes Anderson-y, the type of epiphany that will please acolytes and unnerve detractors in equal measure. I like to think I hail from the former camp, so his last venture should, in theory, be right up my alley. So why is it that the film felt somewhat more emotionally mute than anything Anderson has made before?
For all the visual and technical wizardry, there are moments when The French Dispatch feels uneven. Such, I suspect, is the nature of anthology films: while the first "feature story" (centered on Benicio del Toro’s artist and his muse, Lea Seydoux’s prison guard) sets the film off to a rapturous start. What follows seems to struggle to match the same level of wit, candor, and lingering grief. In the second part, Frances McDormand chronicles a student revolution that finds its poster boy in Chalamet’s Zeffirelli; in the third, Jeffrey Wright trails behind a cook-cum-cop called in to help in a hostage situation. The emotional chord Anderson is prodding at is one of nostalgia: for a kind of journalism, a certain way of life, and a long-gone world. The film is set in the fictional town of Ennui-sur-Blasé, modeled on what feels and looks like a fairytale Paris, and there’s a certain Jacques Tati-like playfulness in the early postcards of the city, a travelogue stitched together at breakneck speed by Owen Wilson’s reporter (watching a waiter walk up a maze of staircases to the magazine’s office is a sight plucked straight out of Tati’s banlieue abode in Mon Oncle). But the sort of longing Anderson strives for is only intermittently evoked by all the stories we’re treated to and all the eccentrics that populate them. Wistfulness has always been a prominent feature of his register; that’s probably why, for a film whose subject should have turned it into his most melancholic to date, The French Dispatch’s inability to fully match form with substance feels so conspicuous. It’s a visually delightful ride packed with all the signature traits that made Anderson’s style so singular—if one whose heart doesn’t seem to beat as loud as it did elsewhere.