Tokyo Taxi Review: A 94-Year-Old Master’s Moving Reflection on Memory

The cab ride in Tokyo Taxi immediately takes on the weight of a final passage. Ninety-four-year-old Yoji Yamada approaches his 91st feature as a summing-up, and he does so by reuniting with his long-time star, 85-year-old Chieko Baisho. Their collaboration signals a film built around reflection and accumulated experience. The story follows elderly Sumire Takano, driven by taxi driver Koji Usami (Takuya Kimura) from Tokyo toward a retirement home in Yokohama.

A routine transfer turns into a spontaneous tour of places that shaped Sumire’s life in the city. The film adapts the 2022 French feature Driving Madeleine, and Yamada reshapes that premise through a distinctly Japanese lens, especially in the way it considers the historical position of women in Japanese society. The taxi interior becomes a private chamber where one life story unfolds with patient detail, its complications shared with a stranger who listens.

The Dynamic of the Confidant and the Confessor: A Measured Connection

Tokyo Taxi gains much of its strength from the evolving relationship inside the cab. Baisho, whose partnership with Yamada spans dozens of titles including the Tora-san films, anchors the drama. As Sumire, she carries the weight of time with quiet authority. The performance combines physical fragility with a sharply observed, “salty” directness that hints at a firm inner core beneath polite manners. Through her, the film links the present-day drive to sepia-tinted memories, with calm narration guiding the viewer between the two time frames.

Takuya Kimura’s Koji arrives with his own concerns, particularly the financial pressure of his daughter’s expensive music-school tuition. Yamada’s script shifts away from the French original by presenting Koji as a driver who feels open and emotionally available from an early stage. That adjustment allows a quicker, more natural connection inside the taxi.

The pair move from strangers to people who willingly share private details in this confined space. As Koji begins to speak about his current problems, the film sets up a gentle parallel with the historical traumas that shape Sumire’s recollections. Their exchanges create a sense of shared vulnerability that makes the growing bond between them feel carefully earned. Yu Aoi’s performance as the young Sumire in the flashback passages adds a crucial dimension. She brings lightness and complexity to the earlier period of Sumire’s life and supports a storyline that occasionally presses hard on melodramatic elements.

Trauma, Tradition, and Cultural Insight: Unveiling Postwar Realities

Tokyo Taxi frames its reminiscence as a study of aging and a pointed social critique. In keeping with themes that have preoccupied Yamada’s later work, Sumire’s trip to the retirement facility functions as both a physical transfer and a symbolic reckoning with everything that has come before. The tone darkens once her account reaches buried experiences, and the film sharpens its focus on the historical circumstances that shaped women’s lives in Japan.

Key episodes in Sumire’s past mark out the postwar decades. Early in the ride, she remembers losing her father in the devastating 1945 Tokyo firebombing. Later, she recalls her first husband, a Zainichi Korean man who returns to his birthplace and leaves her behind. The screenplay reserves its strongest shock for the depiction of her second marriage to an abusive spouse.

This portion of the narrative stands as a direct commentary on the limited social and legal options that women faced when they tried to leave violent relationships in the postwar era. That revelation supplies the film with both its sharpest dramatic turn and its deepest sense of moral weight.

Yamada and his team emphasize the relationship between memory and urban space. Landmarks in Tokyo and Yokohama carry emotional charge, and the film uses them as visual signposts for different chapters of Sumire’s past. The cinematography contrasts the carefully composed sepia images of earlier decades with the bright, contemporary textures of the taxi’s present route.

This play between visual registers reinforces the feeling of historical distance while also keeping the emotion firmly tied to specific streets and buildings. Attention to historical and cultural detail gives the adaptation a distinct identity that feels rooted in Japanese experience even as it draws from a French source.

Mastery of Tone and Narrative Craft: The Yamada Touch

Yamada’s direction reflects a seasoned command of film language, with a familiar mix of drama and gentle humor. The “laugh and a tear” approach that marks much of his long career appears again here, with the film shaping emotional peaks around modest, human-scale moments.

The feelings it generates can seem sentimental or “treacly,” a criticism sometimes raised in relation to his work, and the emotional impact grows from the trust built between the characters. Musical cues occasionally underline key moments in an explicit way, but the sense of feeling arises from what the characters reveal to each other.

Working with co-writer Yuzo Asahara, Yamada crafts a script with a lean, purposeful structure. Dialogue and scene construction give the story a clear path. The film moves cleanly between present scenes inside the cab and the flashbacks that fill in Sumire’s history, and that clarity keeps the narrative from sagging.

The endpoint at the retirement home never comes as a surprise, and the emotional intensity and specific revelations that surface along the route make the final stretch of the film feel richly satisfying. The rhythm stays steady, and the closing passages gain their impact from the shared experience built up between Sumire and Koji.

The movie Tokyo Taxi (Japanese title: TOKYOタクシー) is a 2025 Japanese drama film directed by Yoji Yamada. It premiered as the Centerpiece film at the 38th Tokyo International Film Festival on October 29, 2025, and was released theatrically in Japan on November 21, 2025. The film is a remake of the 2022 French-Belgian drama Driving Madeleine (Une belle course). It tells the story of an elderly woman, Sumire Takano, who is driven by taxi driver Koji Usami to a nursing home. During the ride, she asks Koji to detour through Tokyo to visit meaningful locations from her past, revealing her life’s dramatic and historically relevant story. As of today, November 30, 2025, the film is primarily available in Japanese theaters, with an announced European premiere at the 55th International Film Festival Rotterdam in February 2026.

Full Credits

• Title: Tokyo Taxi (TOKYOタクシー)

• Distributor: Shochiku

• Release date: November 21, 2025 (Japan theatrical release)

• Running time: 103 minutes

• Director: Yoji Yamada

• Writers: Yoji Yamada, Yuzo Asahara, Christian Carion (original story), Cyril Gély (original story)

• Producers and Executive Producers: Shunsuke Fusa, Yoshitaka Ishizuka

• Cast: Chieko Baisho, Takuya Kimura, Yu Aoi, Takaya Sakoda, Yuka, Lee Jun-young, Runa Nakashima, Takashi Sasano, Sanma Akashiya, Shinobu Otake, Kanno Misuzu, Makita Sports, Kitayama Masayasu, Kimura Yura, Kobayashi Nenji

• Director of Photography (Cinematographer): Masashi Chikamori

• Editors: Hiroshi Sugimoto

• Composer: Taisei Iwasaki