Hamaguchi’s award-winning and absorbing new movie Drive My Car deals with issues of grief and infidelity – and reflects his artistic journey towards inner truths

After the 2011 earthquake in Japan, Ryūsuke Hamaguchi was commissioned to make a documentary about the impact on the north-eastern Tōhuku region. He spent hours driving every day with his co-director, and realised how cars take you places in more ways than one. “The two of us aren’t really communicative with each other in general,” he says. “But in the car, we talked more than we did before. In a car, visually you’re satisfied – you’ve got information from the scenery from the windows. But sonically you only get the engine revving and that’s pretty much it. So I think we tend to want to fill that void.”

This in-transit intimacy exerts its mysterious pull in Hamaguchi’s new movie, Drive My Car, which is adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami. It is about Kafuku, a widowed theatre director who reluctantly accepts a female chauffeur, Misaki, while he oversees a new production of Uncle Vanya. As his red Saab 900 winds its way to work, he listens to a cassette of his dead wife reciting lines of Chekhov, and begins to open up to his driver about his grief and her infidelity.