Name: Tokyo Taxi
Director: Yoji Yamada
Genre: Drama
Released: 2025-11-21T00:00:00+00:00
Duration: 103 min
Cast: Chieko Baisho, Takuya Kimura, Yu Aoi, Takaya Sakoda, Yûka

A taxi driver agrees to take the long way, and a whole life climbs into the back seat. That is the engine of Tokyo Taxi, the kind of small, contained premise Yoji Yamada has spent a career trusting. Koji Usami is behind the wheel — tired, short of money, working a shift he needs more than he wants. His passenger is Sumire Takano, eighty-five, who has to get from Shibamata in eastern Tokyo to a care facility down the coast in Hayama. She is in no hurry. She asks him to make detours.

Each detour is a chapter. Instead of cross-cutting between past and present on a fixed schedule, Yamada lets the city do the editing — a street, a shopfront, a stretch of riverbank pulls a memory loose, and the film follows it out the window. The structure is the fare itself. The meter runs, Tokyo slides by, and the route keeps bending away from the destination, because the destination is the one place neither the passenger nor the driver is in any rush to reach.

The casting states the film’s terms before a word of backstory lands. Chieko Baisho plays Sumire with the unforced authority of an actor who has nothing left to prove to this director; she and Yamada have been making films together for six decades, since the early days of his Tora-san cycle. Opposite her, Takuya Kimura works against his own wattage. Koji is not a star part. He is a man counting yen, anxious about a teenage daughter who has been invited to an expensive music school he cannot obviously afford. Kimura keeps the charisma banked and lets the worry do the acting.

Yamada did not invent this story, and he is not pretending otherwise. Tokyo Taxi is his remake of Driving Madeleine, the French two-hander that carried an elderly woman and her cab driver across Paris. The interesting decision is the transplant. Yamada re-roots the material in a precisely mapped Tokyo, swapping Parisian boulevards for the specific texture of Shibamata and the road south into Kanagawa. For a director whose strongest work has always fixed ordinary people in exact places, the remake reads less like an import than a homecoming.

What the detours summon is a younger Sumire, played in flashback by Yu Aoi, and the “grand past” the synopsis keeps pointedly vague. The film withholds. It doles out Sumire’s history in fragments, on her timing, and trusts that the viewer would rather assemble a life than be handed one. That patience is the entire bet. The reveals are not twists so much as slow corrections — the back seat turning out to hold far more than the front seat assumed, the polite old woman resolving, mile by mile, into someone specific.

The risks are the ones a premise this gentle always runs. Driving Madeleine already worked, so the remake has to justify itself beyond competent relocation. A story about an old woman thawing a younger man can slide into sentiment the moment the detours start feeling engineered rather than earned. The grafted subplot of Koji’s daughter and the school fees is a stake that could either ground the film or tug it toward neatness. And Kimura’s fame is its own variable: the part asks him to vanish into an ordinary man, and the camera does not always let a face that famous disappear. Whether Yamada’s restraint holds for the length of the ride is the open question the trailer cannot answer.

Takuya Kimura and Chieko Baisho in the Yoji Yamada drama Tokyo Taxi — Takuya Kimura and Chieko Baisho in Tokyo Taxi (2025)

Around the leads, the cast includes Yu Aoi as the young Sumire, with Takaya Sakoda, Yûka and Korean actor Lee Jun-young in support. Yamada directs from a screenplay he wrote with Yuzo Asahara. Shochiku — the studio that has housed most of his career — produces and distributes. The film runs a compact 103 minutes, long enough for a fare across a city, short enough to feel like one.

Tokyo Taxi had its premiere at the Tokyo International Film Festival and opened in Japanese cinemas on 21 November 2025, with a European berth to follow at the International Film Festival Rotterdam. Spanish audiences get it — as Un taxi en Tokio — on 10 July 2026. The long way around, as Sumire understands better than anyone, is still a way of arriving.