Two years have passed since young Japanese director Ryuske Hamaguchi swept the award at a leading international film festival with his “Drive My car,” released in 2021. In the meantime, studies on the intertextuality of the movie “Drive My car,” Haruki Murakami’s short story collection “Men Without Women,” and Anton Chekhov’s “Uncle Vanya” performed in the film have been conducted steadily in Korea. Nevertheless, I wanted to find more ways to read this film because I thought that there was a very homogeneous flow underlying the various stories built into the interesting framework of a theater performance in the movie.
Through the theater performance in this work, which is in the form of a play within a play, and in the directing work conducted by Ryuske Hamaguchi with the actors, the actors reach the inner side of the role through ’reading’ and ’listening’, and in this process, they reach the deepest part of their own hearts. At this time, the text of “Uncle Vanya” serves as a kind of guidance for characters and actors to reach the deepest part of their own hearts.
This isomorphic movement flowing inside and outside the film is primarily closely connected with director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s unique directing theory. Therefore, I would like to examine the characteristics of this interesting director’s very delicate directing theory and what he aims for as a director, and read the film “Drive My Car” leaning on his directing theory. First, in the following chapter, the characteristics of Hamaguchi’s directing theory and the main concepts of his directing theory that sometimes seem figurative are examined, and in Chapter 3, the method of expressing the text of “Uncle Vanya” at various layers of stories is examined.