This weekend, I watched the movie "Drive My Car" by the Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi. It was one of the finest films I have ever seen, and I cannot stop thinking about all the life lessons I took away from it.
On the surface, this movie is about an actor who lost his wife to a cerebral hemorrhage and who has gone to Hiroshima to direct "Uncle Vanya" by Chekhov. There, he is assigned a driver - a local young woman - to transport him to and from his home to the theater. However, the story is much deeper, and the depth of these main characters is slowly revealed over the two hours and fifty-nine minutes of this film.
We come to understand the traumas these two have gone through and how they have mostly been sleepwalking through life. It is only through the intimacy they develop that they achieve some measure of comfort and consolation.
Ironically, a thought came to me recently in the middle of the night well before I saw this movie. I jotted down that thought on my Ipad, and I happened to remember it today after reflecting on Drive My Car. In it I wrote, "What in the world can we ever truly understand? Perhaps the goal should be to simply understand ourselves. That alone would be a spectacular thing!"
"Drive My Car" teaches us that lesson and does so beautifully. I cannot recommend this film enough. It might just change your life.
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