A Film That Finally Captures Murakami’s Writing
Drive My Car is a special movie. It’s a film about language, but its silences carry the most powerful moments of communication. It’s a three-hour drama about grief, but the experience of watching it is breezily loose and oddly comforting. And it’s one of very few adaptations of the renowned Japanese writer Haruki Murakami’s work, although the moments that best capture his style were invented by the director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi.
Together, these contradictions make Drive My Car an electrifying watch, but a difficult one to properly summarize. Now streaming on HBO Max and competing at the Academy Awards, it’s finding wider audiences that can experience its magic for themselves.
That awards attention marks another revealing contradiction: Despite Japan’s rich film history, including the filmmakers Akira Kurosawa and Hayao Miyazaki, Drive My Car is the country’s most-nominated movie ever at the Oscars and its first to get the nod for Best Picture. It’s also the first non-English-language film from any country selected as Best Picture by all three major American critics groups.
The recognition comes at a time of tentative hope for the future of international film. Drive My Car won Best Non-English Language Film at the Golden Globes, an award whose last two winners were Lee Isaac Chung’s Minari and Bong Joon Ho’s Parasite. Minari’s nomination was controversial as a film set in Arkansas that deals with very American experiences around immigration and isolation. Despite having a script in both English and Korean, Minari was nonetheless relegated to the foreign-language category.
With international films making , progress toward recognition outside the old categories then, will they also find audiences? Will they—as Bong famously urged in 2019—“overcome the one-inch-tall
