Janus Films
MOVIE REVIEW
Drive My Car (2021)
“Performing allowed me to be someone other than myself. And I could revert back when the performance ended,” Haruki Murakami wrote in the short story “Drive My Car,” anthologized in “Men Without Women.” “But the self that one returned to was never exactly the same as the self that one had left behind.” These words are left unspoken by actor-director Yûsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) to his chauffer, Misaki Watari (Tôko Miura), in the film adaptation directed and cowritten by Ryûsuke Hamaguchi. Rather, they are faithfully enacted.