Ryûsuke Hamaguchi reaches a new grandeur with this engrossing adaptation about a theatre director grappling with Chekhov and his wife’s infidelity

Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s mysterious and beautiful new film is inspired by Haruki Murakami’s short story of the same name – and that title, like Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, is designed to tease us with the shiny wistfulness of a Beatles lyric. Hamaguchi’s previous pictures Asako I and II and Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy were about the enigma of identity, the theatrical role play involved in all social interaction and erotic rapture of intimacy. Drive My Car is about all this and more; where once Hamaguchi’s film-making language had seemed to me at the level of jeu d’esprit, now it ascends to something with passion and even a kind of grandeur. It is a film about the link between confession, creativity and sexuality and the unending mystery of other people’s lives and secrets.

Yûsuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a successful actor and theatre director who specialises in experimental multilingual productions with surtitles – he is currently working in Beckett’s Waiting for Godot and is preparing to play the lead in Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya. He has a complex relationship with his wife Oto (Reika Kirishima), a successful writer and TV dramatist who has a habit of murmuring aloud ideas for erotic short stories, trance-like, while she is astride Yûsuke having sex, including a potent vignette about a teenage girl who breaks into the house of the boy with whom she is obsessed.