There’s a story behind that story, too, which is true of nearly everyone and everything in this film. In the later section of “Drive My Car” the story returns to driver Misaki’s story, as she and Yusuke travel to her mountain village, where a landslide destroyed her family home. The directorial technique, like the cinematography, calls zero attention to itself, sometimes skirting conventional framing and lighting, but magically avoiding the obvious. What fleshes out “Drive My Car” and provides its stealth momentum comes from gradually revealed emotional information - scenes, before, during and after “Uncle Vanya” rehearsals, where a character opens up and we learn what’s making her or him tick, or withdraw, or yearn for understanding. So much happens, without conspicuous narrative engineering. Yet its running time turns out to be both unhurried and unerring. The movie runs a minute under three hours, which sounds a little crazy for a 40-to-50 page story, depending on the translation. Hamaguchi and his co-writer Takamasa Oe achieve much the same. It ventures into the minds and hearts of many other characters across several weeks, as they rehearse a play demanding the hardest thing a performer can achieve: simple honesty, and self-examination without indulgence. Those car-bound conversations remain central to co-writer and director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s exquisitely acted expansion of “Drive My Car.” But the film deepens Murakami’s scenario. In the largely Saab-bound short story “Drive My Car,” part of Haruki Murakami’s collection “Men Without Women,” an actor takes a job playing the title role in Anton Chekhov’s simple, profound comedy of thwarted passions, “Uncle Vanya.” (Few consider it funny, even in productions trying to be, but Chekhov classified it as a comedy.) The story largely unfolds as a series of conversations - officious at first, then gradually more unguarded - between the actor, whose wife has died, and his chauffeur, an isolated young woman most at home behind the wheel.

Uncle vanya by anton chekhov