Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s film based on a short story by Haruki Murakami is an exploration of the relationship between a man and a woman and the subtle connections between life and art.
The film won Best Screenplay at the 74th Cannes Film Festival and an Oscar for Best Foreign Film.
Two years after the sudden death of his wife, actor and director Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) comes to Hiroshima to rehearse a production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya with an international cast. According to his idea, the actors will speak in their native languages. To direct this complex performance, he has to know the entire text by heart. As he prepares for the rehearsals, Yūsuke listens to the recording of the play made by his wife not long before her death in his car, together with Misaki (Tōko Miura)—a young woman assigned to be his driver in Hiroshima.
For Ryusuke Hamaguchi, text is a key element of his creator’s universe. In his films, including the five-hour-long Happy Hour (2015), speech creates a rhythm, conveys the experience of time, and defines the relationships between characters. In Drive My Car, Uncle Vanya is first read by Yūsuke’s wife, then by actors during the multilingual rehearsals. The text acts as a commentary on past events, enabling the protagonist to speak of personal experiences without confronting them directly. Chekhov’s phrases heard in various spaces—a car, a rehearsal room, on stage—resonate with experiences of unfaithfulness and a loss, fear of truth, and the impossibility of voicing it. When words and feelings match almost perfectly, the film comes together as an understated and deep story of guilt and confession.
The film will be screened in Japanese, English, German, Taiwanese Mandarin, Filipino, Korean, and Korean Sign Language with Russian subtitles.
«Drive My Car»
Director: Ryusuke Hamaguchi
Japan, 2021. 179 min.
18+