To my great regret, I didn’t see a lot of the movies featured at this year’s Academy Awards. Not that I find them to be the best or most prestigious movies that were released in 2021, but I always like to check out those movies that the Academy chooses to highlight, since they usually don’t get that much attention, and one can sometimes find some true gems among the nominees.
Such is the case, usually, with the International Feature category. So often I find some of the best movies of the year to be among that category, and, at least until Parasite, they got little to no attention.
Parasite did change some things though. Maybe not to the level that some movie fans would have wanted, but it helped pave the way for worldwide consumption of globally produced entertainment, beyond English-spoken media. One might argue, for example, that the success of Squid Game can, to a very small degree, be attributed to Parasite’s triumph as the Best Picture winner of the 2020 Academy Awards, and I find that to be a pleasant and optimistic thought.
Which brings us to 2022. This time around the International Feature category had a plethora of well-crafted works to choose from and among those nominated, there were two clear frontrunners: Norway’s The Worst Person in the World and Japan’s Drive My Car. Besides being nominated as International Features, both were also nominated for writing awards, and Drive My Car was also nominated for Best Picture and Best Director.
I had the pleasure of seeing both films, and today I would like to shine a light on the Japanese production, though I would like to do a piece on Norway’s entry, which I find to be a wonderfully crafted movie as well.
Drive My Car was directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and tells the story of Yusuke, a middle-aged actor and theatre director who discovers his wife Oto is cheating on him but does not confront her about it. A short while after, she passes away from a stroke before they were supposed to have an important conversation. Two years later, Yusuke is invited to stage a play in Hiroshima. In taking the job, Yusuke is obliged to have a driver, as per his contract, and so is driven around by Misaki, a 23-year old girl with whom he forms a bond during his employment, as he confronts the course of his life, and his relationship with his late wife.
I found Drive My Car to be, above all things, wholesome, and deeply emotional and human. Despite its long runtime, Drive My Car mostly flows seamlessly through its sequences and presents a lot of well-crafted moments that accomplish a lot in connecting its characters with a very economic script, in terms of lines.
Hamaguchi successfully crafts in Yusuke a protagonist who conveys such deep layers of emotion without being outwardly vocal about them, or even outwardly physical. He’s a man in pain, you can see that he worries about how he was with his wife while she was alive. He’s haunted by how he could have, and maybe should have been different, how his fears held him back from being honest with Oto about her infidelity, and how he has been unable to move on from those fears and from Oto herself ever since her passing.
It adds a lot to the drama the fact that the man Oto was cheating on Yusuke with, Koji, is cast in Yusuke’s play. Yusuke deliberately chooses for Koji to have the lead role, as a way to flip the roles on him, have him play the character whose feelings so much mirror Yusuke’s. In doing so, Yusuke hopes to put Koji in a difficult position, playing a role he doesn’t want and for which he isn’t particularly suited. But also, Yusuke wants to see a different person play that torturing role and see what happens, what a different man would have done in that character’s shoes, which are Yusuke’s shoes.
He comes to relinquish that desire by story’s end. In forming a bond with Misaki, who he comes to see as a bit of a daughter-figure, and in learning about her past and what she’s been through, Yusuke learns that there is no changing what happened between him and his wife. He suffered his own tragedies, just as Misaki suffered hers, and there is nothing left for either one beyond living on, independently of what came before. Being like Koji would not have been the answer for Yusuke, and what happened between Koji and Oto does not change the fact that Oto really did love her husband. Due to external circumstances, Yusuke has to make the decision to play the lead role himself or abandon the work entirely. He liberates himself from the pain of his past by playing the role one more time, and delivers a performance free from the torture of feeling his own failures and regrets played out on stage.
Hamaguchi succeeds in conveying this feeling of nostalgic melancholy throughout the runtime through minimalistic cinematic techniques. The editing is sharp and the cinematography is framed in a plain and static fashion, in order to keep your focus on the characters and their emotions. The lighting, on the other hand, is quite integral and very proficient, I believe because pivotal scenes take place in Yusuke’s car, and Hamaguchi wanted to highlight key aspects of the actor’s performances, through the refracting windows and altering lighting found in a moving vehicle. However, this aspect of direction is found not only in the car scenes, but across all settings. Additionally, the longing nature of certain shots which keep going for a while as the camera lingers on the action reflects this intention. Drive My Car is a movie about lingering, about having to find the strength to move away from the past, to stop fearing it and live on, and it’s about saying a lot with very little. Every aspect of the direction drives these points home (no pun intended), making for a very thematically wholesome experience.
It’s quite spectacular that, given such a chosen method of storytelling, Drive My Car does not overstay its welcome too much. Its three hours of runtime go by as smoothly as a three-hour action movie, and that’s saying a lot. It comes down to brilliant work in characterization, writing and acting. These are very interesting characters, with a lot going on inside their heads that you want to get a deep look into, and Hamaguchi teases you with introspective scenes one after the other, without giving everything away at the beginning, keeping you engaged. While I do think some scenes might have been trimmed down, maybe edited to be a bit shorter, none are unnecessary and their combined effect is a pretty well-paced structure for such a story.
It’s not often that I recommend a three-hour drama with few concerns that some people may find it boring or unengaging or dragging, but with Drive My Car I don’t really have that worry. If you feel that this story might be something you want to check out, see it. It will go by pretty smoothly and you’ll be thankful for giving it a chance. It’s another example of international works in film making and storytelling that should have greater exposure because they have something different, interesting and of value to add to the industry. It’s one of the year’s best, for sure.