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Some films excel their narrative. They are prolonged aesthetic sighs, sculpted by a wound that refuses to heal. Drive My Car (Ryusuke Hamaguchi, 2021) belongs to such category. In the corners of Hiroshima – a city that survived near-total annihilation – Ryûsuke Hamaguchi offers an affective map of pain as the political production of subjectivity. The film examines how life – lifespan, bodily memory, frozen emotions – is regulated, performed, and administered as a means of power and resistance. It is thus included in the tradition of biopolitics.
Michel Foucault helped us to understand that modern power no longer governs through death, but through life instead. Rule becomes the management of bodies, gestures, confessions, silences, and modes of being. Yûsuke Kafuku’s mourning is not merely private: it is a battlefield between the biological and the symbolic, between the body that drives each day and the soul that remains motionless before the grave of Oto, his departed wife.
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Listening as a biopolitical weapon
In Hamaguchi’s world, listening is a political gesture. In the ritual of replaying cassette tapes – where Oto’s voice calmly recites passages from Uncle Vanya – Yûsuke performs a daily choreography of grief. The car becomes a sanctuary, a psychoanalytic chamber, a capsule for subjective survival. Oto’s recorded voice, immutable and static, becomes a relic of a time before he was forced to face loss. He listens not only to remember, but also to avoid moving forward.
Here lies the film’s first biopolitical layer: listening as self-governance, as a method of emotional regulation. Grief, which ought to disorganise, is carefully choreographed by Yûsuke – rehearsed lines, repeated scripts, precise driving – as if the aesthetics of routine could stave off existential disorder.
Setting the film in Hiroshima is no coincidence. It is a political act. As a symbol of national trauma, Hiroshima embodies the legacy of a war machine that ushered in the age of risk management and bodily precariouness. By filming there, Hamaguchi signals that every character, like the city itself, is marked by forces beyond them. They are post-atomic bodies, emotionally irradiated.
The multilingual theatre directed by Yûsuke becomes a metaphor for this fragmented reality. Korean, Japanese, and Taiwanese actors, using sign language and other semiotic systems, create a stage where the body becomes a translator. A translator of silence, of trauma, of the unspeakable. Again, we encounter biopolitics: life performed as a technique of the self, a strategy for survival, interaction, and endurance. The body becomes a world archive. The stage, a laboratory for rehearsing the human condition.
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The cartographer of emotions
It is through Misaki Watari, the reserved chauffeur who accompanies Yûsuke, that the film establishes its axis of biopolitical resistance. Unlike Yûsuke, Misaki does not listen to tapes. Instead, she listens to the world. Her eyes are ever alert to the rear-view mirror, to spoken words and those left unspoken. Her face bears a physical scar, yet it is her unseen pain that propels her. Having lost her mother in a landslide, she carries guilt like a sentence.
But she also leads, both literally and metaphorically. Misaki is the mediator between trauma and momentum, between a frozen past and an imaginable future. As she offers herself first as listener, then as confidante, she transforms the car into a reversed confessional: the most intimate space of life (trauma) now moves along the road, free, like a wounded animal seeking shelter in the wild.
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Silence as a mode of governance
The great aesthetic and political power of Drive My Car lies in its refusal of catharsis. No one screams, smashes plates, or runs in slow motion. Tears are subdued, nearly invisible. Revelations arrive like dissonant notes in a minimalist score. It is stoicism that prevails.
This emotional minimalism is inherently biopolitical. In a world addicted to spectacle, where social platforms externalise, monetise and disseminate trauma, choosing silence is resistance. There is no spectacle of suffering here, but rather a composition for those willing to listen slowly. The silent body is a rebellious body. It does not scream, because in this world, the one who shouts is a domesticated faster.
Oto, the late wife who lives through the tapes, is a riddle. A scriptwriter of erotic and mysterious tales, she was unfaithful. Yet also a partner, a lover, a narrator of shared life. Yûsuke neither understood nor attempted to understand her. The film refrains from judging. It simply observes her, as a body of words no longer available for interrogation.
At this point, Hamaguchi offers a subtle criticism of modern relationships: partnerships managed like corporations, where everything must be transparent, resolved, and healed. But Oto eludes this. She belongs to desire. And desire is untamed power; it does not stoop to control. Her body was already insubordinate before death.
Drive My Car is a riff on regulated love, resolved life, and compulsoriness of emotional clarity. To love is also to embrace opacity, the unknowable. What dies is not Oto’s body, but the illusion that another can ever be fully translated.
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A space for slow freedom
In the final journey, when Yûsuke and Misaki travel to her childhood home – now buried in snow and landslide debris – the film delivers its most profound gesture: to transpose trauma from the individual to the landscape. That ghost town, whitened in silence, is also a portrait of rural Japan, and of a forgotten class, never given space to express sorrow. Misaki’s mother’s death also symbolises the silencing of an entire generation of abused, invisible women.
Burying that past with flowers becomes a ritual of emotional reparation. A declaration that even neglected bodies deserve a dignified funeral, however symbolic. It is the biopolitics of care: to restore to life what power has denied – the right to suffer with dignity.
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Drive My Car offers no answers and no redemption. Only continuation: Misaki carries on driving. Yûsuke may have returned to the stage. Life, like the vehicle, moves on – even on an empty tank. This is the film’s most radical poetic and political gesture: to refuse closure and resolution.
Hamaguchi rejects spectacle, which is the ultimate biopolitical gesture. It organises grief as politics, silence as revolt, and the body as territory.
In an era governed by urgency and emotional management, the Japanese director establishes a road where the only rule is listening. A listening that does not heal, but enables perpetuity. In times of hyper-speed, this film is a revolutionary act of slowness.
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