Ryusuke Hamaguchi's three-hour adaptation of Haruki Murakami's short story. The first Japanese film to be nominated for Best Picture. Won Best International Feature.
Tokyo and Hiroshima, contemporary. Yusuke Kafuku is a respected stage director and actor whose wife Oto, a successful screenwriter, dies unexpectedly. Two years after her death, Yusuke accepts a commission to direct a Hiroshima Theatre Festival production of Anton Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, using his characteristic multi-language casting approach (the production includes actors speaking Mandarin, Tagalog, Korean, English, Japanese, and Korean sign language simultaneously). The festival arrangement requires Yusuke to be driven each day by a young female driver named Misaki.
The film tracks the rehearsal period across approximately two months. The Yusuke-Misaki working relationship slowly deepens into a genuine connection. The Uncle Vanya rehearsals progressively confront questions about Yusuke's late wife. The film's penultimate sequence is an extended drive to Misaki's hometown in Hokkaido, where Yusuke and Misaki finally discuss the specific losses that have shaped both of their interior lives. The film closes with the production of Uncle Vanya and with a brief epilogue depicting Misaki in Korea with a dog that may have been Yusuke's wife's.
Drive My Car was nominated for four Academy Awards at the 2022 ceremony — Best Picture, Best Director (Ryusuke Hamaguchi), Best Adapted Screenplay (Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe), and Best International Feature. It won Best International Feature; CODA won Best Picture. The film is, by structural significance, the first Japanese-language film ever nominated for Best Picture.
The nomination represented the continued expansion of the post-2016 Academy reform discussed in our Oscar essay. The expanded Academy membership produced voting body more-aligned with international art-cinema taste than the pre-2016 Academy. Parasite's 2020 Best Picture win opened the structural door; Drive My Car's 2022 nomination extended the post-Parasite tradition. Whether subsequent Japanese-language films will reach the nominations again remains an open question; Hamaguchi's standing in international art cinema has, since this film, been confirmed at the highest level.
Drive My Car runs 179 minutes. The runtime is, by contemporary commercial-cinema standards, extreme. Almost no other 2021 release reached this length. The film's specific commitment to the longer form is, in some sense, the film's substantive content — the unhurried observational register, the willingness to stay with conversations across their actual duration, the patience with the rehearsal-room sequences that conventional cinema would have heavily compressed.
What the runtime achieves is the gradual development of the audience's relationship with the protagonists. The Yusuke-Misaki connection that forms the film's emotional centre would not, structurally, land at conventional runtime. The relationship is built across many small interactions in the car — the daily drives, the cigarettes shared with the windows down, the gradual extension of personal disclosure. The slowness is the substance. Audiences who can sit with the runtime experience the film as one of the most-emotionally-rewarding of the early 2020s; audiences who cannot find it difficult.
The film's central structural device is the Uncle Vanya production that Yusuke is directing across the runtime. The rehearsal sequences, the production-design discussions, the multi-language casting work all unfold in parallel with the personal-grief material the film's first half establishes. The Chekhov material is not, structurally, decorative — the play's themes (regret, missed opportunity, the recognition of one's own past failings) are directly relevant to Yusuke's interior state.
The structural payoff is that the production of Uncle Vanya in the film's closing sequences operates simultaneously as the theatrical performance the festival has paid for and as Yusuke's emotional working-through of his late wife's death. The final on-stage delivery of Vanya's closing monologue — delivered in Korean sign language by the deaf actress Yoo-na — is, in the film's framing, both a piece of theatrical performance and an emotional resolution Yusuke has been working toward. The dual operation is the film's specific craft achievement.