Drive My Car

Drive My Car, nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best International Feature Film, and Best Adapted Screenplay at the 94th Academy Awards, is a critically acclaimed Japanese melodrama. The story revolves around four key characters. Protagonist Kafuku Yusuke is a renowned actor and theater director with a calm and quiet demeanor who is shocked to discover that his wife has a sexual relationship with a much younger man. His wife Oto is a creative and expressive mind who conceives ideas for her screenwriting while and after having sex. Young actor Takatsuki Koji seems to have a self-confident swagger but starts questioning his whole existence after a relationship with a minor destroys his career and leads to excessive media coverage. Watari Misaki is a young woman who suffered mental and physical abuse from her unstable mother in Hokkaido and started a new life as driver in Hiroshima. This movie explores the relationships between some of these characters and deals with overcoming challenges in general and processing loss in particular.

This movie convinces on several levels. First and foremost, the aforementioned characters are authentic, detailed and profound. Viewers will discover more about them with every single scene and care about their fates. Especially their flaws make it easy to empathize or even sympathize with them.

The acting performances are also very convincing. Especially the actresses truly deliver the goods. Kirishima Reika shines in the opening of the movie as free-spirited, imaginative and mysterious screenwriter. The very best performance might however come from Miura Toko as skilled driver in an identity crisis who doesn't speak much thoughout the film but transmits many emotions through precise body language in general and subtle facial expressions in particular.

Drive My Car is filled with many artistic, intellectual and philosophical references. This goes along with the artistic, creative and expressive characters. Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot is particularly referenced in the beginning while Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya receives much attention through the movie's middle section and ending. It also is no coincidence that the movie's setting shifts from downtown Tokyo to Hiroshima and its rural surroundings. Attentive viewers will also realize that the closing scene takes place in South Korea. These numerous subtle elements are complemented by an elegant soundtrack featuring classical music and the use of a red Sab 900 that represents individualism and nostalgia in a time of colletivism and change. This movie offers much to discover for an intellectual audience and is worth being viewed on several occasions to discover new facets.

The film is however not without its flaws. The running time of three hours includes a few minor lengths here and there. Especially the introduction that takes more than forty minutes before the opening credits appear could have been shortened a little bit. Some of the theater play practises and sequences also overstay their welcome and can at times be somewhat pretentious with passages featuring numerous foreign languages from Korean sign language to Taiwanese Mandarin.

At the end of the day, Drive My Car is a melodrama with emotional depth and intellectual details. This timeless film should please anyone looking for profound dramas built upon authentic characters. Patient viewers will be rewarded with a story that resonates long after the movie has ended.

Things are left unsaid but it's too late, the time has passed but moving on stagnates, the engine sits and dwells, the seas disturbed with swells, as thoughts revolve, left unresolved, and memories rotate.

A reflective piece of filmmaking that idles along at a sedentary pace but never stalls as the lives of two severed souls journey through their pasts together and untwine the chords that shackle them to memories and moments of regret. Beautiful performances all round through a subtle and imaginative approach that will leave you contemplative and reflective, perhaps even more so if you have a similar scenario performing in your own background.

Drive My Car is the sort of movie that, were I to describe it to myself, I'd be wary of it. It's leisurely paced - the first hour is essentially prologue - not a lot happens, and and takes time to get into its rhythm.

But ultimately it's kind of amazing. There's a remarkable subtlety to the characters, the focus on acting as a process is intriguing, and the movie doesn't offer answers but does offer ways to reconsider things you thought you know that are surprisingly compelling. It is also one of these movies you can't imagine being made in America; it just couldn't happen.

This is a movie that sticks with me in a way most movies don't. You should check it out.

Fancy a 55min long Prologue? Look no further!

This surely is an unconventional movie, that combines the principles of acting, story structure and well written dialogue so well, that you at times forget, that you are NOT watching an acting masterclass.

This movie is not an easy watch, its 3h long and yes, you feel it, but that is not necessarily a bad thing. In my opinion, the movie could have cut out 30mins, but the length is used as a storytelling device as well and the movie takes its time to flash out its characters to make them 3-dimensional, which works very well for most of them.

For a movie that has no less than 7 languages in it and (as far as I can judge from the subs) well written dialogue, there is so much left unsaid and left in between the lines for you to interpret.

The weakness of this movie unfortunately is its ending, which didnt satisfy me in the way you would expect a 3h movie to wrap up, but this is just my opinion and you might feel different about it. The ride is certainly worth hopping on!

Hamaguchi is an expert on dialogue: it feels vivid, provocative and thoughtful. He wants to make us think in life choices, relationships and how do we show what we really feel. "If" is the question mark always present that make us think about all the different ways and possibilities in life. How we treat the others. They way they see us and our actions. How do we want to be seen.

I would like to have love Drive My Car as much as most people. I think it is a good film, but just that. I think is way overlong - and you feel it -, I think that some plots are probably unnecessary and that it develops in a very predictable way. I also think it's not the best film of the director this year, even if it will stay with me for some time.