I watched Ryusuke Hamagchi’s movie, “Drive My Car”. It recalls the strength of movies in traditional but vivid ways. There are three points for this claim.
(1) The mixture of stories in text into real based on a lot of coincidences.
(2) Multicultural communications of people, explicitly as different ethnics and inexplicitly as closely related people
(3) Old-fashioned visual expressions dated from Yasujiro Ozu.
(1) is something actors/actresses find when they confront a particular act. Beautiful lines of time sequences and coincidences trace the movie with sensitive fingers. This is a common key of Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s movies. (2) is related to main theme of this movie, lined by Japanese, Korean, Pekingese, Spanish, English, Russian, sign language etc. For (3), an example is the cuts of casts facing directly to camera, investing as if the listeners are the audiences themselves. All these three aspects are integrated to the main theme, to understand each other however harsh it is. The existence of an unknown observer who does nothing but recognizes the change of the world vividly is inexplicitly indicated in the story of the main character’s wife. These matters struck me and recall the strength of movie in traditional sense.
