“Drive My Car” An intellectual exploration of “words” that transcends the “walls” of dialogue

A theatrical methodology that deconstructs and reconstructs “words”

We can never fully understand other people. But we can't stop wanting to understand them. This film affirms the people who struggle in that dilemma. "Drive My Car" looks at people trying to come closer together through the music of art, such as theater, literature, and film.

Moreover, the production process of this work was also one that conveyed a very serious attitude. In the play, a rehearsal scene is depicted in which the actors "speak their lines without emotion, allowing the words to sink into themselves," which is a method often adopted by theater groups with an academic style. In the production of this work, interviews were conducted with theater companies such as "Chiten" and "Chelfitsch," a choice that makes sense.

Chiten expresses the texts of Chekhov and Dostoevsky with their own unique intonation and pronunciation, breaking down the words we know and displaying them as if they were physical objects. Chelfitsch uses hyper Japanese, borrowing the colloquialism of young people. In the large number of lines that sound like monologues, the subject shifts and the actors and their roles blend together, creating a world that is unclear as either fiction or reality. Both works are characterized by their methodology of presenting the discrepancy between language and the body in an awkward balance.

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Here we can see a connection to the element that originally attracted Director Hamaguchi to "Drive My Car." That is, "How can words and voices that are not acting come out?" What is written in a novel must be expressed through the series of actions of a film, and through the actor's body. To reach this realm, it becomes necessary to "understand" the words themselves on a deep level.

Although their approach is different from that of chelfitsch, who break down the stories left behind by the great masters into the "sounds" of their voices, creating "points" where meaning is acquired only by speaking them out loud, and evolving everyday conversations into a hyper-real realm, thus breaking down the concept of theater, there are some overlapping points of view.