A middle aged man and an attractive young woman bond over their intimate encounters with death in 2021's Drive My Car. It's a Japanese movie but the title is English because of the Beatles song it's derived from, though the filmmakers were unable to secure rights to use the song. It's hard to see where the song would belong in this sterile, overlong, fairly typical Oscar winner.
Drive My Car won Best International Film, the new name for the Best Foreign Language Film category, despite the fact that International and Foreign Language don't mean the same thing. In this case, though, it's appropriate because the protagonist of Drive My Car is a theatre director coordinating a production of Uncle Vanya starring an international cast with everyone speaking lines in their native languages.
In one scene, a group of older Japanese cast members joke about how they almost fall asleep when a castmate is speaking in a language they can't understand. So the film throws a bone to audience members who might not be on board with the idea but forgets to present any argument as to what the technique is meant to accomplish. It comes off instead as a pretentious gimmick. The film itself, with a low stakes, low key tone, is reminiscent of the usual very safe foreign language nominees, superficial and pandering.
The film begins with a beautiful naked woman (Reika Kirishima) telling a story about a teenage girl who routinely sneaks into the bedroom of a boy she has a crush on, a story reminiscent of Chungking Express. Listening to the story is the woman's husband and the film's protagonist, Yusuku Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima). Almost every time they have sex, she usually has inspiration for a television script she tells him the story for afterwards. It seems like the film's trying to say something about the audience and artist relationship but the concept vanishes kind of quickly and I was left with the feeling that the movie was just delivering some softcore porn sanitised with a pretentious veneer of intelligence.
The movie shows its awareness of great works of art. First Yusuke is shown starring in Waiting for Godot and then the bulk of the film involves his directing a production of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. It's here he's forced for obscure insurance reasons to employ a personal driver, a surly, shabbily dressed young woman with a scar on her cheek named Misaki Watari (Toko Miura). I knew at some point we were going to get an explanation for that scar that tied directly into the main plot.
The whole film was oddly predictable. I frequently found myself guessing what was going to happen two or three minutes before it did. When Yusuke goes to the airport and his flight was suddenly cancelled, I thought, "Oh, he's going to go home and find his wife is cheating on him." And it happened. When Yusuke asks his Korean assistant director (Jin Dae-yeon) how he knows sign language and is able to talk to the production's sign language speaking cast member (Park Yu-rim), I instantly knew the cast member was secretly the man's wife, but it wasn't officially revealed until Yusuke saw them standing, grinning smugly, next to each other outside their home.
The movie's three hours long and it's filled with scenes that seem utterly pointless, this being one of them. The scene doesn't contribute to the main plot nor does it have any particular artistic value for its own sake. The Korean couple have this peculiar air of serenity despite supposedly being apologetic for having lied to Yusuke.
Really, the only scene in the film that has interesting energy is one in which Yusuke finds himself confronting the man whom his wife cheated on him with, Koji (Masaki Okada). The younger man is a popular and attractive actor who sleeps with a lot of women and poor Yusuke finds out that he knows some intimate details about his wife that he wasn't aware of himself. But this ends up being another point just to shore up sympathy for Yusuke, a man abused by luck who is also just so virtuous that he feels guilty anyway.
In the film's final act, Misaki drives Yusuke all the way from Hiroshima to Hokkaido, to an empty hillside where the small village in which Misaki had grown up had once stood. You can almost sense the filmmakers scrambling as they realise, nearly three hours in, they haven't offered the audience anything of particular value other than to say Chekov was a great playwright. So Yusuke directly delivers a message about death and mourning to Misaki and the audience, a message that, oddly enough, comes across as kind of anti-Ozu. Just a little reminder that Ozu, like Kurosawa or Mizoguchi or Miyazaki or any number of other Japanese filmmakers, deserved to win an Oscar before Drive My Car ever did.
Drive My Car is available on HBOMax.
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