I tend to distrust movies that look this ready to break your heart. Tokyo Taxi has the setup of a prestige weepie polished to a shine: a weary cab driver, an elderly woman leaving her home behind, and a long ride through the city where every detour comes with a memory. The danger is obvious. One wrong turn and the whole thing becomes emotional tourism with a meter running.
But Yoji Yamada, now 94 and directing his 91st feature, knows this terrain all too well to merely coast through it. A remake of the French drama Driving Madeleine, Tokyo Taxi opens Japan Cuts with a story that’s old-fashioned in the least apologetic sense: patient, actor-driven, sentimental, and built around people actually listening to each other. That sounds simple. In movies, it’s becoming rarer than it should be.
Koji Usami (Takuya Kimura) is a Tokyo taxi driver running on exhaustion and worry. His teenage daughter has a chance to enter a prestigious music school, but the fees are punishing, and the family finances are already stretched thin. Then comes a long-distance booking: 85-year-old Sumire Takano (Chieko BaishoT) needs to be driven from Shibamata to a nursing home in Hayama. She’s sharp with him at first, and he’s too tired to hide his irritation gracefully. It isn’t a promising start, which of course means the movie has plans for both of them.
Soon, Sumire asks for detours. She doesn’t want the expressway because the view bores her; she wants to see Tokyo slowly, as if saying goodbye requires street corners, bridges, and old neighbourhoods instead of efficiency. The cab becomes a moving confessional, though not in the slick, therapy-session way that phrase can suggest. Koji doesn’t become a saint behind the wheel. He fidgets, misjudges, says the wrong thing, and carries his own anxieties about money and fatherhood. But he stays there, listening, while Sumire begins handing over the pieces of a life she’s spent decades surviving.
Those pieces are not small. Her memories take in the Tokyo air raids, a first love with a Zainichi Korean man, single motherhood, domestic abuse, prison, the loss of a son, and the strange afterlife of scandal. Yamada frames these recollections as both personal history and social memory, the story of a woman shaped by war, patriarchy, poverty, and a country that often asked women and children to endure what should never have been endured in the first place. Meanwhile, Baisho never turns Sumire into a museum piece. She’s frail, yes, but also proud, funny, vain, impatient, and still capable of embarrassing Koji into saying aloud that he loves his wife.
This is heavy material, and Tokyo Taxi doesn’t always carry it lightly. The flashbacks, with Yu Aoi as the younger Sumire, are handsomely staged but occasionally too eager to underline what Baisho’s face has already told us. Some passages push hard toward melodrama, especially when Sumire’s marriage curdles into cruelty. Koji’s money troubles, meanwhile, move toward a resolution visible well before the film arrives there. Yamada’s touch can be square, even fussy, and there are moments when the film behaves as though viewers might miss the feeling unless it’s placed directly under a warm lamp.
And yet the sentiment usually holds because Kimura and Baisho give it friction. He plays Koji as a decent man worn down by practical life, not secretly waiting to become enlightened by a magical passenger. On the other hand, she gives Sumire enough flint to keep pity at bay. Their best exchanges aren’t speeches or emotional breakthroughs, but little adjustments in tone: her calling him by name, him correcting his own impatience, both of them slowly abandoning the formal distance between driver and fare.
Tokyo Taxi is sentimental. There’s no point pretending otherwise. But sentimentality, in Yamada’s hands, can still have texture: the sound of two voices inside a cab, the city slipping past the windows, an old woman refusing the faster route because memory has no use for shortcuts. The film takes you roughly where you expect. The surprise is that, by the end, the familiar road still feels worth travelling.
