Drive My Car Movie Review: Deep Perspective On Loss

Drive My Car (Bitters End)

JAKARTA - The film Drive My Car is in the spotlight after setting a record as the first Japanese film to be nominated for Best Picture at the 2022 Oscars.

After the victory of the South Korean film Parasite, which won an award at the 2020 Oscars, this time Asia again gave the best film at the 2022 Oscars. Drive My Car won four Oscar nominations, including the categories Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Best International Film.

This 2021 Japanese drama film is written and directed by Ryusuke Hamaguchi and is an adaptation of one of the titles in writer Haruki Murakami's short story, Men Without Women.

This film revolves around the life of a famous actor and stage director, Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima). After work, he finds his wife, Oto Kafuku (Reika Kirishima), had passed out and was later pronounced dead from a brain hemorrhage. His life was originally peaceful, then changed.

At the beginning, the audience was immediately presented with a bed scene with a beautiful narration voiced by Oto. The two of them make love to each other in the dark. Apparently, the director wanted to tell the intimacy of the couple.

The story in this film runs dynamically, sometimes even slowly. It clearly shows scene by scene where each character talks about what they have experienced. Like Misaki explaining about her mother, or when Koji told about how he knew Oto.

There are no flashbacks or scenes that depict the past. Hamagachi focuses on portraying through dialogue the characters do. How each character tells their perception of the events that happened to them.

The perhaps extraordinarily long length of Drive My Car offers stunning visuals, fragile and tough characters, and a slow but firm storytelling that digs deeper into differing perceptions of loss and how to get through it.

You can legally watch Drive My Car via the KlikFilm streaming platform starting March 2, 2022.