Nominated for four Academy Awards, DRIVE MY CAR motors along like a road movie version of Vanya on 42nd Street mixed with Waiting for Godot.
After playing in an acclaimed production of Waiting For Godot, theatre maker Kafuku makes a devastating discovery about his wife, a successful screenwriter. Soon after that she is dead.
Kafuku heads to Hiroshima to direct an experimental production of Chekov’s ‘Uncle Vanya’ in which all the parts are delivered in different languages (including sign). He carries a recording of the play with his wife’s voice on it, a practice that has been a perennial part of his work process. He likes to listen to the tape before and after rehearsal so he takes it as an imposition that the theatre company in Hiroshima insist that he has a driver while employed by them.
After discussion that looks like a deal breaker, Kafuku concedes and accepts the condition and is introduced to Watari, the sullen, chain-smoking female driver the festival organisers have hired. She is very much a peripheral, albeit pivotal player for the film’s opening two hours, before the pair eventually decide to open up to one another about their various woes.
Meanwhile, Kafuku auditions, casts and begins rehearsals of the play, and the drama within the drama begins to deepen. A multi cultural, multi lingual production creates its own tensions but the biggest torque is generated by the casting of an actor who was a protege of Kafuku’s late wife and somewhat of a loose cannon due to sudden popular fame.
DRIVE MY CAR has been nominated for four Oscars, Best Picture, Best International Picture, Best Director, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and Best Adapted Screenplay by Hamaguchi and Takamas Owe, based on a short story by Haruki Murakami.
The short story is a springboard for a sublime dive into a deep pool of emotion and the film takes its own sweet time to drive through the detours, the back roads of story, the bends and curves of narrative, the development of the idea that it is better to travel hopefully than to arrive.
DRIVE MY CAR is a deceptively super charged film with beautifully understated performances navigating pain and fame, grief and loss, gorgeously photographed by Hidetoshi Shinomiya, and imbued with an evocative but unintrusive score by Eiko Ishibashi.
Buckle up and enjoy the ride.