Drive My Car - English subtitled
Much-acclaimed Haruki Murakami-adaptation about the special friendship between a theatre director mourning the loss of his wife, and his taciturn female chauffeur. Winner of the Oscar for best international film.
A rising director in the firmament of contemporary Japanese cinema, Ryusuke Hamaguchi delivers a road movie sui generis that travels paths of loneliness, loss, and bereavement.
Yusuke Kafuku is a successful stage actor and director, married to Oto, a beautiful playwright with many secrets, with whom he shares a beautiful life, a painful past, and a fruitful artistic collaboration. When Oto dies suddenly, Kafuku is left with the many unanswered questions their relationship has always posed, and regret over his inability to truly understand her. Two years later, still incapable of fully coping with his loss, he accepts an offer to direct a play at a theatre festival and drives to Hiroshima in his immaculate, flaming red Saab 900. At his destination, having to comply with the strict festival rules, he will have to let Misaki Watari, a taciturn young woman and a very skilled chauffeur, drive his car.
Travelling the bluish hues of Hamaguchi’s landscapes and settings, the bright red car strikes the eye and the imagination – a special host to memories and sorrows, listener to hundreds of lines from plays recited by Kafuku like ritual litanies, and the special central character of a special movie.