Drive My Car (2021) on Netflix
Two years after his wife Oto's death, Tokyo actor and director Yūsuke Kafuku goes to Hiroshima to stage Uncle Vanya. The festival assigns him a reserved young driver, Misaki Watari.
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- Netflix4.3/5
- IMDb7.5/1078,062 votes
- Rotten Tomatoes97%
Trailer
Plot summary
Yūsuke Kafuku is a Tokyo stage actor and director who memorizes his lines from tapes that his wife Oto, a screenwriter, records for him. After Oto dies, he takes a residency in Hiroshima, where he will stage Uncle Vanya with a cast performing in their own languages. Among those cast are Lee Yoo-na, an actress who does not speak and signs in Korean, and Kōji Takatsuki, a young television star. For insurance reasons, the festival insists that he ride in his own car with a hired driver, and a young chauffeur named Misaki Watari takes the wheel of his red Saab. He is reluctant to hand over the wheel at first.
Cast
- Hiroko Matsudaas Yumi Etô
Did you know?!Facts and trivia about Drive My Car (2021)
Can contain spoilers, watch the movie first.
- Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi wanted to use the Beatles' song "Drive My Car", which gives the film and Haruki Murakami's story their name, but getting permission proved too difficult, so he used a Beethoven string quartet piece referenced in Murakami's original story instead.
- Drive My Car was originally set in Busan, South Korea, but the production changed the setting to Hiroshima because of the COVID-19 pandemic.
- Drive My Car was the first Japanese film to receive an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture, and Ryusuke Hamaguchi became the third Japanese director nominated for Best Director, after Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1965 and Akira Kurosawa in 1985.
- At the 2021 Cannes Film Festival, where Drive My Car won three awards including Best Screenplay, Ryusuke Hamaguchi and co-writer Takamasa Oe became the first Japanese individuals to win the festival's Best Screenplay Award.
- Haruki Murakami's original story features a yellow Saab 900 convertible, but the film changed it to a red Saab 900 Turbo so the car would visually complement the Hiroshima landscape.
- Composer Eiko Ishibashi's score changed Ryusuke Hamaguchi's usual approach: the director, who normally avoids music in his films, said hearing what she made was the first time he thought music could work in one of them.
- Drive My Car became one of only seven films, and the first non-English-language film, to win Best Picture from all three major U.S. critics groups — LAFCA, NYFCC and NSFC — alongside Goodfellas, Schindler's List, L.A. Confidential, The Social Network, The Hurt Locker and Tár.
