179 min | NR | November 24, 2021 | Janus Films
A theater director who lost his wife stages a multilingual Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima and lets a quiet young woman drive his red Saab. He thinks the car is where he hides from his grief. It turns out to be where he finally faces it.
Yusuke Kafuku is a stage actor and director who builds his work on a strict method. He records his late wife reading Chekhov and runs lines against the tape as he drives. Two years after her death he takes a residency in Hiroshima to direct Uncle Vanya. The theater assigns him a driver and forbids him from operating the car himself. The film is about a man who has organized his entire life to avoid being a passenger to his own feelings. Ryusuke Hamaguchi makes that surrender literal and then earns it.
Hidetoshi Nishijima plays Kafuku with a stillness that reads as control and conceals damage. He delivers grief through restraint, holding his face flat while his voice does the work in the recorded scene-readings. Toko Miura plays Misaki Watari, the driver, with a guardedness that matches his own. The two of them sit in silence in the front seats and the film trusts that silence to build intimacy. Masaki Okada plays Koshi Takatsuki, a young actor with a connection to Kafuku’s wife, and his charm carries a current of danger. The casting of the cab driver and the cargo passenger as mirrors of the same wound is the engine of the picture.
Hamaguchi adapts Haruki Murakami with co-writer Takamasa Oe and refuses to rush. The opening credits arrive past the forty-minute mark, which resets the audience’s sense of where the story even begins. The staging of Vanya in multiple languages, including Korean Sign Language, turns the rehearsal scenes into a thesis about communication across barriers we cannot cross by words alone. Cinematographer Hidetoshi Shinomiya shoots the red Saab against grey highways and tunnels so the car becomes a moving confessional. The sound design lets the engine and the cassette tape fill spaces where dialogue would be cheaper.
This is a film about the lies people tell to keep functioning and the moment those lies stop holding. Kafuku and Misaki are both carrying a death they believe they caused. The long drive north forces them to say the thing each has refused to say. Hamaguchi treats catharsis as labor rather than relief and stages the breakthrough without a single swell of false uplift. He builds three hours of accumulated silence and then lets two people finally speak.