Drive My Car

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car takes its premise from a short story and stretches it, patiently, into three hours that never feel padded, because the padding is the point: grief, the film argues, cannot be processed on a schedule, and the audience has to sit inside that duration to understand its widowed protagonist at all.

A theater director staging a multilingual production of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya is forced by festival policy to accept a driver for his daily commute. What could be a simple two-hander instead becomes a study of two people circling their own unspoken damage from opposite directions, conducted almost entirely in the confined, moving space of a car — a setting the film treats less like transport and more like a confessional booth with a windshield.

Hamaguchi's real subject is the gap between the words we're given and the ones we mean, dramatized through a rehearsal method where actors read the same lines aloud, in different languages, without inflection, until the meaning underneath the performance becomes unavoidable. By the time the director finally says the thing he's been avoiding, the film has spent two and a half hours training its audience to hear what silence has been carrying instead.

— Amir Morsali, BIPA Editorial