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A performance of a classic play is the main action of one much-honored recent movie, Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car, and
a major subtext in another, Almodovar's Parallel Mothers. Director-screenwriters
Hamaguchi and Almodovar use the theme of theater to create stories
of great nuance and depth, exploring the mysteries of the human
heart and—in Almodovar's case—the tragedies of Spanish
history.
Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, Drive My Car revolves
around an experimental, multilingual performance at a Hiroshima
theater festival of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya. The
director, Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima), has played Vanya and is an
acknowledged expert on the play. He insists on staying at a
hotel an hour from the theater, so he can practice his ritual of
playing a cassette in his car of his late wife Oto (Reika
Kirishima) speaking the lines of Sonya, with himself answering as
Vanya. However, the festival's rules mandate that he have a
driver, and the organizers assign a young woman, Misaki (Toko
Miura), to drive Yusuke.
From the film's prologue, we
know that Yusuke has glaucoma in one eye, which makes him resent
Misaki's presence as a reminder of his encroaching
disability. We also know that Oto was having an affair with
a young actor, Takatsuki (Masaki Okada), just before her
death. When Takatsuki—who has no idea Yusuke knows
about the affair—auditions for the play, Yusuke casts him as
Vanya, though Takatsuki is too young for the role. The other
actors had expected Yusuke to cast himself.
Drive My Car progresses
from there, with more characters and more unexpected corners in
its plot than can be discussed in an average-sized review.
Hamaguchi's opening gambit must be noted: Oto, a screenwriter,
gets her best story ideas during sex with Yusuke and relates them
to him. Hamaguchi also reveals during the film that a major
character has a volatile temper, which becomes a crucial plot
point toward the end. Thus he follows Chekhov's classic
dictum: if you wave a gun in the first act, it must go off in the
second.
It becomes apparent that Uncle Vanya is both a touchstone and a millstone
for Yusuke. "Chekhov is terrifying," he says at one point. "Whenever you
say his lines, it drags out the real you." Specific lines spoken by Vanya
haunt him: "For twenty-five years he's been pretending to be someone he's
not," and "That woman's fidelity is a lie through and through." It takes a
spur-of-the-moment overnight drive, to Misaki's ruined home village in
wintry Hokkaido, to bring catharsis to Yusuke. In the bargain, he learns
some things about Misaki that reveal her to be as complicated, and as
tragic, as any Chekhovian heroine.
With a running time of three hours, Drive My Car is not for the impatient.
It is thematically and emotionally complex, dependent on quiet revelations
of character for its impact. Speaking for myself, Hamaguchi had me from
the opening scene, with a naked Oto waking in a violet dawn in her and
Yusuke's high-windowed bedroom, relating her latest story idea. The
story—about a teenage girl who becomes obsessed with a classmate and
breaks into his bedroom when she knows he won't be home—is mysterious,
erotic. She does not finish the story, and it remains unfinished—so far as
Yusuke knows—at her death. It is not till much later that, when he least
expects it, he learns the end. This storyline is only one of many reasons why Drive My Car is a hypnotic, immersive experience. Drive My Car won the
Best International Feature Film Oscar, as well as the Best Foreign Film
Golden Globe and Best Screenplay at Cannes. It is hard to think of a more
deserving winner in any filmmaking year.
Another play—Garcia Lorca's Dona Rosita the Spinster—figures in Parallel
Mothers. Teresa (Altana Sanchez-Gijon), mother of Ana (Milena Smit),
stars in a production of Dona Rosita. This is not the center of the film's
plot, but the identity of the playwright is significant.
Parallel Mothers begins with Janis (Penelope Cruz), a magazine
photographer in Madrid, doing a photo shoot of forensic archeologist
Arturo (Israel Elijalde). Janis has a favor to ask of Arturo: could his
foundation excavate the suspected mass grave of her great-grandfather and
other men from her hometown, all of whom were murdered at the start of
the Spanish Civil War? Arturo makes no promises but says he will take up
the subject with his board of directors. One thing leads to another, and
soon Janis and Arturo are sharing a bed.
Janis becomes pregnant. Arturo has a wife, so marriage is out of the
question. Janis decides to have and keep the baby. In the hospital she
befriends her roommate Ana, a teenager whose delivery is also imminent.
Ana does not wish to discuss the circumstances of her pregnancy and has a
strained relationship with Teresa, who visits her. Teresa is touring Spain in
the role of Dona Rosita, and Ana resents her prolonged absences.
Janis' daughter Cecilia and Ana's daughter Anita are born on the same day.
Months after the births, Arturo shows up at Janis' apartment, asking to see
Cecilia. When he sees the baby, he insists she looks nothing like him and
that she can't be his. Janis throws him out, but later, on her own, she
decides to have a blood test. What she discovers is earth-shattering; not
only is Arturo not Cecilia's father, but Janis is not her mother. Several plot
twists later, the apparent conclusion is confirmed: Cecilia and Anita were
accidentally switched in the hospital.
From this revelation Parallel Mothers progresses. The story allows
Almodovar to pursue some of his favorite themes: the festering of long
-kept secrets; the grief and guilt faced by women in general and mothers in
particular; the bitter, lingering wounds left by the Spanish Civil War and
the long, evil reign of Franco. How well Almodovar ties these themes
together at the end is debatable, but that he has made an engrossing and
often powerful film is not. His final image at a gravesite is unforgettable,
a reminder of Faulkner's aphorism that the past is not dead or even past.
The murdered men of the war, starting with Garcia Lorca whose remains
have never been found, will always be with Spain.
To say what happens to Janis after her discovery, in her dealings first with
Ana and then with Arturo, would reveal too much. I can tell you that Cruz,
who is in nearly every scene, gives a masterful, moving performance that
more than justified her Best Actress Oscar nomination. The rest of the cast
matches her. Sanchez-Gijon has a striking scene in the film's midpoint,
confessing to Janis her remorse for putting her career above her daughter.
But hers is only one of many distinguished performances in Parallel
Mothers, some only a minute or two in duration.
The past several years have given us some great screenwriting: Belfast, The
Father, Hell or High Water, 12 Years a Slave, Three Billboards Outside
Ebbing, Missouri, Spotlight, Manchester by the Sea, Moonlight, Call Me By
Your Name, Parasite, Roma, Cold War, Promising Young Woman, The
Power of the Dog. Drive My Car and Parallel Mothers not only rank
among the best-written films of those years, but merit comparison with the
work of the playwrights they honor. Like Chekhov and Garcia Lorca,
Hamaguchi and Almodovar understand the worlds that are contained in a
well-crafted line and a well-drawn character. Their films demonstrate that
understanding, and reinforce the simple truth that cinema, first and
foremost, is theater. In an age of CGI spectaculars, it is good to see that the
play is still the thing.
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Writings
