Drive My Car

dir. Ryusuke Hamaguchi · 2021

Snapshot

A three-hour elegy on grief, language, and the ethics of inhabiting another person's words, Drive My Car adapts Haruki Murakami's short story of the same title from the 2014 collection Men Without Women, expanding it into a formally rigorous, emotionally devastating drama. Stage actor and director Yusuke Kafuku, having lost his screenwriter wife Oto to a sudden cerebral hemorrhage, travels to Hiroshima to mount a radically multilingual production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya, accompanied by a taciturn young woman named Misaki assigned as his driver. The film won the Academy Award for Best International Feature Film at the 94th Oscars, became only one of a handful of non-English-language films ever nominated for Best Picture, and confirmed Ryusuke Hamaguchi as the defining figure of contemporary Japanese art cinema. Its achievement lies in making Chekhovian duration and moral paralysis feel urgently cinematic rather than stagily literary.

Industry & production

Drive My Car was produced by C&I Entertainment with support from the Japan Art Fund and in association with BUG FILMS. The project grew directly from Hamaguchi's sustained engagement with Murakami's fiction: rather than adapting the title story alone, he and co-writer Takamasa Oe drew structural and thematic material from at least two other stories in Men Without Women — most notably "Scheherazade," whose motif of a woman weaving compulsive night-time narratives becomes Oto's defining habit — to construct a screenplay of substantially greater length and complexity than the source. The film runs 179 minutes, a duration Hamaguchi defended not as indulgence but as the minimum necessary for the viewer to experience time the way grief does.

Filming took place across multiple Japanese locations including Hiroshima, Tokyo, and Hokkaido, the last of which supplies the film's desolate epilogue landscape. The production followed Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy, Hamaguchi's anthology feature shot around the same period; both premiered at Berlin and Cannes respectively in 2021, an extraordinary dual showing that marked the year as his international breakthrough. Drive My Car's budget was modest by international art-film standards; precise figures have not been widely disclosed, and the film does not fit the profile of a major studio venture — it belongs to the tradition of producer-driven auteur filmmaking that sustains mid-scale Japanese cinema outside the major studio system.

Technology

The film was shot digitally, in the widescreen aspect ratio that allows the Saab 900's red interior to function as a contained, intimate frame-within-a-frame. While the specific digital camera package has not been foregrounded in production materials, the image has the characteristic qualities of high-resolution digital capture common to contemporary Japanese art productions — controlled grain structure, precision in low-light interiors, and a flatness in outdoor sequences that resists romantic beautification. Eiko Ishibashi's score exists partly as diegetic cassette tape recordings, blurring the distinction between soundtrack and story: the cassette Oto made of Uncle Vanya — on which she voices every character including those Kafuku himself will play — is reproduced through the car's tape deck with conspicuously analogue warmth, a deliberate low-fidelity against the clarity of the digital image.

Technique

Cinematography

Hidetoshi Shinomiya, who had previously photographed Hamaguchi's Asako I & II (2018), shoots Drive My Car with a rigorous plainness that refuses to aestheticize sorrow. The camera rarely moves for expressive purposes; instead it holds on faces at unhurried medium-close range, or frames the Saab from outside as it moves through city or mountain road, the interior dimly visible through glass. This glass-and-car motif — Kafuku and Misaki often seen through windshields, their reflections doubling the characters — literalizes the film's recurring concern with oblique self-knowledge, with the difficulty of seeing oneself clearly. Shinomiya's palette is cool and overcast for most of the Hiroshima sequences; when warmth enters, it is conspicuous, almost suspicious.

Editing

Editor Azusa Yamazaki makes the film's most radical formal argument: the title card for Drive My Car does not appear until approximately forty minutes into the running time, after a prologue that in any conventional film would constitute a short feature in itself. This prologue — covering the full arc of Kafuku's marriage, Oto's erotic storytelling sessions, the discovery of her infidelity, and her death — is not labeled or separated; it simply runs. Audiences unaware of this strategy often experience genuine disorientation when the title finally appears. The effect is less a trick than a philosophical statement: grief cannot be skipped past, and the film requires you to have lived alongside Oto before it can ask you to mourn her. Elsewhere Yamazaki's cuts are unobtrusive, organised by the rhythms of performance and conversation rather than by conventional dramatic beats.

Mise-en-scène / staging

The multilingual Uncle Vanya production within the film is the conceptual centrepiece. Hamaguchi casts Kafuku's company with actors performing in Korean, Mandarin, Japanese, and Korean Sign Language — the last embodied by an actress (Park Yurim) who is Deaf and signs throughout, her performance neither subtitled onscreen nor explained, presented as legitimate theatrical language on equal terms. The choices are not merely cosmetic diversity: they dramatise Chekhov's theme of people unable to reach one another, literalising it across language barriers. The staging sequences are filmed with a calm observational authority, the camera treating the rehearsal room as a found space rather than a constructed one.

The car itself is the film's other principal stage. The red Saab 900 functions as a mobile confessional: isolated from the world, moving but not arriving, its seats arranged so that driver and passenger face forward rather than each other — a spatial configuration that Hamaguchi exploits to enable a form of sideways intimacy, confessions delivered to the windshield rather than to a face.

Sound

The sound design is structured around the cassette recordings Oto made — her voice performing all roles in Vanya, including Sonya, so that Kafuku rehearses his own lines against the ghost of his wife voicing every other character. This is not underscored or emotionally signalled; it is presented as a practical working method that has tipped into something more compulsive and painful. The tape hiss and warmth of analogue playback contrast with the silence of Misaki's driving. Ishibashi's score, mostly strings and sparse keyboard, enters late and sparingly; its restraint means that when it rises, the emotional impact is considerable.

Performance

Hidetoshi Nishijima as Kafuku gives one of the great performances of recent Japanese cinema in a mode that resists legibility. Kafuku is a man who has trained himself not to react — he closes his eyes for a long beat before speaking, he conducts rehearsals with preternatural calm — and Nishijima inhabits this controlled surface while permitting grief to leak through it at intervals that feel genuinely unguarded. Toko Miura as Misaki is equally meticulous in her stillness; the two actors must establish intimacy without conventional markers of warmth, and they succeed through accumulation, through the slow accrual of shared hours in a car.

Hamaguchi's documented rehearsal method — requiring actors to read lines in a deliberately affectless, neutral register before adding emotional inflection — produces a particular quality of delivery: words are heard as words before they are felt as feeling, and the audience registers both the text and the character's relation to it simultaneously. This technique, developed most elaborately in the 317-minute Happy Hour (2015), was refined for the professional cast here, producing performances that feel inhabited rather than demonstrated.

Narrative & dramatic mode

Drive My Car operates in what might be called the confessional pastoral: characters move from city to a provisional, temporary space — the festival hotel, the rehearsal room, the car — and there excavate buried truths through extended conversation. The dramatic mode owes more to the late Chekhov of Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters than to conventional film narrative; problems are not solved but arrived at, circled, partly articulated. The film's climax is not an action but a speech: Misaki's account of her own trauma, delivered in the barren snowscape of Hokkaido, which in turn illuminates the climactic speech Sonya delivers at the end of the embedded Vanya production. Hamaguchi sets these two confessions in dialogue, one fictional, one personal, suggesting that drama — at its best — gives language to what direct conversation cannot.

Genre & cycle

The film sits at the intersection of several formations: the Japanese literary adaptation (Hamaguchi is part of a tradition that includes adaptations of Mishima, Oe, and Ogawa); the Chekhovian slow cinema practised internationally by filmmakers like Carlos Reygadas, Béla Tarr, and Kelly Reichardt; and a specifically post-2000 cycle of Japanese films engaging with grief, silence, and survivor guilt (Hirokazu Kore-eda's work is the obvious reference, though tonally distinct). It is also legible within a global art-cinema conversation about performance and meta-theatrical doubling — films in which actors performing plays become conduits for meaning that exceeds the drama — a lineage that includes films by Olivier Assayas and Lars von Trier among others.

Authorship & method

Ryusuke Hamaguchi (b. 1978) studied film at Tokyo University of the Arts (Tokyo Geidai) under Kiyoshi Kurosawa, and his graduate research centred on the work of Hong Sang-soo — an influence legible in his interest in conversation as a primary cinematic event, in repetition as structure, and in the gap between what characters say and what they mean. His broader formative influences include John Cassavetes (the use of extended rehearsal and semi-improvisational preparation), Eric Rohmer (the moral comedy of talk, the literary adaptation), and Mikio Naruse (the observation of emotional constraint as a social condition specific to Japanese domestic life).

Co-writer Takamasa Oe has collaborated with Hamaguchi on multiple projects; the partnership produces screenplays of unusual density, structured around dialogue that bears re-reading and re-hearing. Hidetoshi Shinomiya (cinematographer) and Azusa Yamazaki (editor) are key recurring collaborators who have shaped the visual and temporal signature of Hamaguchi's mature work. Eiko Ishibashi, a musician and composer outside the mainstream film industry, brings a sensibility rooted in experimental rock and free improvisation; her score does not comment on the action so much as it extends the film's emotional atmosphere.

Movement / national cinema

Drive My Car arrives at a moment when Japanese art cinema has reasserted itself on the international festival circuit after a period in which Korean and Chinese cinemas had dominated critical attention. The film is continuous with a strain of Japanese filmmaking — associated with Kore-eda, Kawase Naomi, and Ogigami Naoko — that proceeds by accumulation and understatement, that distrusts melodrama, and that treats family and domestic space as the primary arena of moral life. It departs from this strain in its density of literary reference and its explicit engagement with theatrical form; the Chekhov is not merely a backdrop but a structural argument, and the film reads as a work in which cinematic thinking and theatrical thinking are inseparable. In this respect it connects Hamaguchi to a tradition of Japanese directors with deep stage backgrounds, though Hamaguchi himself comes primarily from cinema and critical theory.

Era / period

The film belongs to the post-3/11 moment in Japanese cultural life — though it does not address the 2011 earthquake and tsunami directly, the critical language that has grown up around it invokes a climate of unprocessed loss and the inadequacy of existing emotional vocabularies. More immediately it reflects the period of its production: the Hiroshima setting carries its historical weight quietly, as geography rather than symbol; the festival world of international co-productions and multicultural casting reflects an early-2020s art-cinema milieu that is consciously cosmopolitan.

Themes

The film's central inquiry is into the ethics and costs of language: Oto wrote stories and screenplays, refining raw experience into narrative; Kafuku inhabits written roles, speaking other people's words as a profession; Chekhov's Vanya speaks words no one wants to hear. At issue throughout is whether language can genuinely transmit interiority, or whether all speech is performance, all intimacy provisional. The car as confessional — a space without eye contact, with motion as its rhythm — suggests that some truths can only be told in transit, in a mode of not-quite-arrival.

Grief is the film's emotional substrate, but Hamaguchi is specifically interested in withheld grief, in the damage done by knowledge that arrives too late for the known to be confronted. Kafuku knew of his wife's infidelity but chose not to speak; now she is dead and the conversation cannot happen. Uncle Vanya stages the same structure at every level: characters who did not act when they could have, who face the remainder of their lives with the knowledge that the decisive moment has passed. Hamaguchi does not offer consolation, but he does suggest — through Sonya's final speech, through Misaki's eventual thaw — that language, however inadequate, is the only instrument available.

Reception, canon & influence

Drive My Car won the Best Screenplay award (Prix du scénario) at the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, where it competed in the main selection — a recognition that foregrounded the screenplay's structural ambition rather than merely its literary source. At the 94th Academy Awards (2022) it won Best International Feature Film and received nominations for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay. The Best Picture nomination was widely noted as historically exceptional for a Japanese-language film; the film's commercial distribution in North America through Janus Films and streaming through MUBI gave it unusual visibility in Anglophone markets for a three-hour Japanese drama.

Influences on the film (backward): The Chekhovian inheritance is the most visible: not only the play-within-film, but the film's structural and moral assumptions — the sense that drama consists in what is not said, that time accumulates into revelation — are deeply Chekhovian. Hamaguchi's debt to Hong Sang-soo is traceable in the use of digressive conversation as the site of incident. Cassavetes's improvisational preparation and Rohmer's morally precise treatment of talk are documented influences. Within Japanese cinema, Naruse's films of emotional constraint — particularly Floating Clouds (1955) and When a Woman Ascends the Stairs (1960) — model the kind of suffering that manifests as perfect composure. Lee Chang-dong, whose Poetry (2010) similarly uses artistic practice as a vehicle for grief, is a proximate contemporary reference; Hamaguchi has spoken of the Korean new wave as formative.

Legacy (forward): The film arrived at a moment when "slow cinema" was being reassessed — accused by some critics of European festivalisation, of an aesthetic of deliberateness that had hardened into formula. Drive My Car met that critique not by speeding up but by making its duration feel necessary and its slow movement feel charged. Its influence on subsequent festival filmmaking is already apparent in a heightened interest in embedded theatrical text, in the car as intimate space, and in multilingual casting as a formal rather than merely political gesture. Hamaguchi's subsequent international profile has ensured sustained critical attention; the film is already a fixture on end-of-decade lists and in syllabus discussions of twenty-first-century world cinema. Whether it will prove as durable as the Chekhov it honours is the kind of question only time — the film's own most patient subject — can answer.