It won an Oscar for best foreign film
"Drive My Car"...a bleak road trip about love and loss
The film is about a fifty-year-old who befriends his twenty-year-old driver.
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If you read the paragraph describing the Japanese movie, Drive My Car, on Google,
The description of the film is not accurate at all, and compares it to the films “Green Book” which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 2018 and “Driving Miss Daisy,” which won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1989. Both films are about exactly the same theme and theme.
"Drive My Car," which won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in the "Slap" version of the Oscars, revolves around similar elements, but in a completely different situation and subject matter than the two American films.
It seems to us that "Hollywood" is fond of films about drivers who befriend those they ride with.
If the two American films are about racism (the first is about an old white woman who befriends a black driver, and the second is about a black young man who befriends a white driver), then this film is about a fifty-year-old who befriends his twenties, who was forced upon him.
Most creamy
“Drive My Car” is adapted from the book of short stories “Men Without Women” by Haruki Murakami, published in 2014. It is the story of a sad marriage wrapped in a study of the behavior of two characters, the relationship between the hero and his driver, published in less than 40 pages of the book.
Some may question the wisdom of quoting the story into a three-hour movie.
The answer may be that young director Ryosuke Hamaguchi lengthened the quote, so he could give his characters their full screen rights.
In this type of film, you find the introduction spanning 40 minutes, as if to tell us that wounds take a long time to heal.
The result is that it is Hamaguchi's most heart-stopping film since its international prominence in 2015. While the original story buries its protagonist's secret in the middle, director and screenwriter Takamasa Oo re-arranges events more sequentially than the book to create a cumulative weight of events that stresses the hero's shattered psyche.
In the first chapter in Tokyo, we see the marriage of theater director Yusuke (Hidetoshi Nishijima) and screenwriter Otto (Rika Kirishima), through shots in complete darkness that we hear about the scenes of the play that suddenly come to Otto's imagination in bed.
The couple suffers the tragic death of their young daughter, and because of the incident, Otto's behavior deviates and they form secret relationships outside of marriage.
Yusuke decides to shut up and not tell her about it, and one day while he is going to work, his wife tells him that she wants to talk to him about something that evening, and when he comes home late, he finds her dead as a result of a brain hemorrhage.
withdrawal from life
Yusuke decides to withdraw from life, and the place he withdraws to is his old car in which he turns on the tape device to hear the dialogues of the play recorded in his wife's voice for memorization.
Yosuke's car is a Swedish Saab 900, red.
It may seem strange to use a non-Japanese car, but the color choice is wise, the eye can't miss it even when Hamaguchi takes the shot from above, there is only one red car in the shot that the eye goes to.
In the car are two characters, Yusuke and the tape device who speaks in his wife's voice as if he is the other world that Yusuke has withdrawn into.
Two years later, Yosuke receives an invitation from the Hiroshima Theater Festival to direct the play "Uncle Vanya" by Russian writer Anton Chekhov.
After he accepts the invitation, organizers inform him that he cannot drive due to a past accident in which an artist working with the festival ran over a pedestrian.
Therefore, the festival will hire a professional chauffeur to drive the red Yusuke car, and will cover the costs of that.
Yosuke sees this as a breach of his privacy and creative space;
But he has no choice but to accept.
Driver Misaki (Toko Miura) is an introvert, who seems to have a painful past, which is not the kind of friendship between two people: these two people don't talk to break the silence between them, but Yosuke's tapes that fill the void.
In the auditions, Yusuke discovers that one of the actors is Takatsuki, who thinks the first is the man his wife cheated on him with, so he begins to treat him dry by assigning a role that does not suit him.
But it is the car that reflects the most important space in the film, in which he reveals what is in the chest with the gradual evolution of Yusuke and Misaki's relationship, and they both use the other to vent their concerns.
“Drive My Car” is an unusual movie, in which the road represents a circle or knot, meaning it has no beginning or end. It is routinely followed by a friend of the car, and it is the only space to reveal what is in the chest.
The viewer may find - as the writer of this topic - strange about the Hiroshima Theater Festival renting a driver to drive the hero’s car and not a rented car. It is really evident in the last scene, which reflects the two car friends getting rid of their knots.
slow and sad
"Drive My Car" is a slow and sad movie, and you don't expect much to happen, as it focuses on the emotional trajectory of its characters rather than following the events of its plot.
It is the second Japanese film to win the "Oscar" in the category of best foreign film of the 21st century, after Departures won the 81st edition in 2008.
• The film is based on the book “Men Without Women” written by Haruki Murakami, published in 2014.
• In this type of film, the presentation extends for 40 minutes, as if to tell us: that wounds need a long time to heal.
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