And The Oscar Goes To Japan? - Drive My Car By Ryūsuke Hamaguchi
Against the trend of ever-faster media consumption, Drive My Car [ドライブ・マイ・カー] is a movie with three hours running time and a profound and reflective story that proves that theatrical releases can still have a certain appeal.
It just won a Golden Globe for best non-english language picture [for the first time in 62 years for a Japanese movie to clinch the title] which could be an indicator for its chances for an Oscar at the Academy Awards in March.
The film is an adaptation of the short story of the same name from the book "Men Without Women" by Japan's bestselling author Haruki Murakami. Director Hamaguchi manages to create a film out of the 50-page short story that is impressively self-contained and profoundly moving. Thus, in "Drive My Car," one can also find plot lines from other stories of Murakami's book such as from "Scheherazade" and "Kino”. Overall, the movie’s central theme are the struggle and inability to know the people close to us in their completeness.
Spoilers ahead
Ahead of the main story, a 40-minute first act introduces the movie. Yusuke Kafuku [Hidetoshi Nishijima] and Oto Kafuku [Reika Kirishima] are a married couple. He is a famous theatre actor, she is a scriptwriter for TV productions. To rehearse his text for Chekhov's "Uncle Vanja" in his beloved car, a red SAAB 900, Oto recorded the lines on a tape for her husband, Yusuke. Despite their great marriage, Yusuke catches his wife cheating with actor Koji Takatsuki [Masaki Okada]. The main story begins two years after Oto’s death because of a cerebral haemorrhage.
While Yusuke is preparing to be the artist in residence at a theatre in Hiroshima to stage his experimental multilingual productions of Checkov's Uncle Vanja, he gets a driver as per the company's policy. While being reluctant at first to hand over the steering wheel to Watari Misaki [Toko Miura], a young woman, over time, he finds out that the two share somewhat a similar fate and becomes friends with his driver.
Expect beautiful images of Japan, moving conversations and a three-hour ride, after which you don't want to get off at all.
