‘Drive My Car’ First Japanese Film To Win Best Film Oscar Nomination

Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s superb ‘Drive My Car’ has received a record number of nominations for Japan, in the 94th Academy Awards. As well as nominations for Best Picture and Best International Feature Film, the film, based on a Haruki Murakami short story, is in the running for Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay. Japanese cinema has had a reasonable number of nominations over the years and some wins, including the award for Best International Film in 2008 for Yōjirō Takita’s Departures. Giant of Japanese film, Akira Kurosawa, had four Oscar nominations for Ran but no Japanese movie has ever received a Best Film nomination.

Drive My Car has already won a Golden Globe Award for Best International Feature and garnered rave reviews worldwide by critics and audiences alike. Proclaimed best film of the year by the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles and Toronto Film Critics Associations, it has also been shortlisted for three BAFTAs, including for Best Film Not in the English Language. 

A short story by acclaimed Japanese author Haruki Murakami has been made into an engrossing three hour film. Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a stage actor and director is happily married to Oto (Reika Kirishima), a screenwriter. After Oto dies suddenly, early in the film, Yusuke realises she has left a secret behind. Two years later, Kafuku, still unable to fully cope with the loss of his wife, receives an offer to direct Chekhov’s 1898 play Uncle Vanya, at a theater festival in Hiroshima. There, he meets Misaki (Toko Miura), a taciturn young woman assigned to become his chauffeur in his own beloved red Saab 900. As they spend time together on long drives, Kafuku confronts the mystery of his wife and achieves a sort of peace.

Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi has said “to some extent, all films are fiction and documentary at the same time….I believe there is no such thing as pure fiction or pure documentary.” He says that one of the reasons he wanted to make a film based on Murakami’s short story was that it depicts the interactions between two intriguing characters inside a car. The descriptions of these two people jogged his “own memories of intimate conversations that are only born within that closed-off, moving space. Because it’s a moving space, it’s actually nowhere, and there are times when that place helps us discover aspects of ourselves that we’ve never showed anyone, or thoughts that we couldn’t put into words before.”

Drive My Car is a story for our times, about art, love, loss and resilience. At cinemas now: UK/Eire Listings; North American Listings.