“Shortening the distance”: Exploring Eiko Ishibashi’s beautifully tender ‘Drive My Car’ score
Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car serves as one of those rare cinematic instances where the tragedy and drama of its narrative only really hit the audience once the credits have begun to roll. In some ways, this is akin to the kind of emotional trauma that lies buried beneath its main characters: actor and theatre director Yusuke Kafuku and Misaki Watari, the woman hired to drive him around Hiroshima, Japan, as he prepares to direct a multilingual production of Anton Chekhov’s play Uncle Vanya.
Spoiler Alert. Two years before the production, Yusuke witnessed first-hand his wife’s infidelity with a young actor who would incidentally come to be cast in the lead role of his version of Uncle Vanya. The worst was yet to come, though. Unable to confront Oto’s cheating, Yusuke largely ignored the sorrow and confusion that raged within him, only for Oto to pass away from a brain haemorrhage days later.
There’s a symbolic significance within Chekhov’s play, too, as both Hamaguchi and Haruki Murakami (who wrote the short story the film is based on) insist that there’s a power within the Russian writer’s words that seem to pull out the inner emotion of those who speak and perform them. Shortly after Oto’s death, Yusuke had played the role of Uncle Vanya but experienced a mental breakdown on stage, a bubbling-up of emotion that he was quick to push back down, at least until we find him again amid another production of the play.
As with Yusuke, Misaki also seems to harbour a deeply hidden emotion that is not elucidated upon until the film’s end, and she drives Yusuke around with an affectless depression, mirroring the malaise and sorrow of the actor who sits behind. It’s only at the film’s conclusion, in a snow-covered scene of genuine beauty, that we discover that Misaki had previously chosen not to pull her cruel and abusive mother from a landslide that destroyed their house five years prior. She has been living in regret and grief ever since — an admission she’s only able to make after Yusuke finally opens up.
Both Drive My Car and Uncle Vanya explore the kind of trauma and loss that so many of us seem to want to push away rather than accept – to posit that it’s only through the power of art and connection with other human beings that such trauma can be addressed. Hamaguchi’s film, though, possesses another element through which this latent trauma seems to be exposed – the absolutely beautiful and tender score from Eiko Ishibashi.
Ishibashi’s work on Drive My Car is nothing short of astounding, and I spent the three days after watching the film and listening to it repeatedly. It’s carefully constructed composition that evokes travel, longing and – in line with the mood and theme of the piece of cinema it comes from – an exploration of the kinds of emotions that we are wont to hide from, or in the instance of Yusuke and Misaki, actually drive away from.
Somehow, Ishibashi’s effort on the Drive My Car score perfectly embodies Hamaguchi’s narrative and is, in fact, a crucial cog in its overall brilliance. During an interview with Composer, Ishibashi explained her understanding of music and how even the slightest sound can contain fragments of narrative that the sound-maker might be unable to express with words. “I believe that when a person produces a sound, it always inhabits a story,” she said, “Even if the person is not conscious of it”.
The song’s main theme, ‘Drive My Car’, evokes car trips through countryside lanes where memories are being formed but are not yet fully understood. But it’s ‘Misaki’ where the true sadness of the characters seems to come to aural life, where a repetitive sprawling piano motif persistently hammers away at some deep sorrow that lies beneath our usual perceptions – the ones that we desperately cling to in our ignorance.
There’s just something so powerful about the sounds here, say on ‘the important thing is to work’, where these words can’t do justice as to what is being captured by Ishibashi and her band, an evocation so damn moving all I can do is fall down at the incapability of language – an irony considering the championing of literature within the film. But cinema is an audial and visual medium, and thankfully, Hamaguchi has Ishibashi at hand to drive his point home.
There are moments of ambient healing, too, on ‘We’ll live through the long, long nights’, as though anticipating the kind of acceptance of sorrow and grief that Yusuke and Misaki will eventually find. And then true climactic elevation on ‘Kafuku’, where the connection between humans is finally established, not just between Yusuke and Misaki, but also Yusuke and Uncle Vanya, Yusuke and Chekhov, Yusuke and his fellow actors, Hamaguchi and Murakami and, most importantly in this instance, between Ishibashi and the audience.
The beauty of the Drive My Car score, though, lies in its confounding nature and lack of explanation. There are no words, no lyrical understanding; it’s just pure emotion. Emotion where tears cannot be contained within the eyes. The music strikes deep at the heart, and as Yusuke find himself in Uncle Vanya, so too do we find ourselves in him.
Ishibashi explained the complexity of the film and how she wanted the score to come across. “I felt that it sublimated a complex story of multiple layers of loss into a universal and simple tale,” she said. “When the images came up, the beauty of the images, the great acting of the actors, and the clarity and vividness of the sounds of the cars and boats came to life. I created the music with the hope that it would accentuate those images and sounds, while at the same time fitting in with the flow of the story.”
“Hamaguchi did not give me any specific instructions,” the composer added. “I made the music without knowing which scene it would be applied to. I liked that approach very much. The director requested that the music be dry, but that it play a role in shortening the distance between the audience and the images, and that the music be like a landscape.”
And that’s precisely the effect that the score has, a shortening of the distance between audience and image, always bringing us closer to the latent grief of the film’s characters. The music of Drive My Car sticks with you long after the credits have rolled and does the admirable task of making an already quality narrative into something of a masterpiece.
Listen to the beautiful score in full below.
