Oscar for Best International Film
Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s film, based on a story by Japanese writer Murakami, arrives at Filmin
What has been repeated the most about ‘Drive My Car’, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s proposal, is its duration. It is noteworthy that it lasts up to three hours, but that should not be a barrier to discovering this major work of contemporary cinema. It is a story about loss and grief that is comforting. A film in which languages and words play a leading role, but silence does even more. And, if you like, also an update on that famous phrase by Jean-Luc Godard: to make a movie you only need a girl and a car. As a result of its arrival at Filmin, we break down the keys around this year’s Oscar for Best International Film.
who is your manager
Ryūsuke Hamaguchi, a Japanese filmmaker, will have a hard time forgetting 2021. In February last year he won the Berlin Bear with ‘The Wheel of Fortune and Fantasy’ and in the summer he premiered ‘Drive My Car’ at the Cannes Film Festival. The flood of awards that he has been reaping with this film culminated just a few weeks ago with the Oscar and, although this success has definitely put him on the movie map, Hamaguchi has a long career behind him. Trained at the Tokyo University of the Arts, this avowed admirer of Cassavettes has refined his style film after film while also exploring the most extreme footage. In the case of ‘Drive My Car’, its 180 minutes are necessary for its two protagonists, wounded and marked by absence, to recognize each other. Kafuku is a playwright who has lost his wife and Misaki is the young host in charge of taking him to rehearsals for his new project. They will share trips and conversations.
Why did he want to adapt Murakami?
The dramatic seed of ‘Drive My Car’ comes from ‘Men Without Women’, a book of short stories published by Murakami in 2014. Hamaguchi found his protagonists in the scarce fifty pages of the homonymous story and added elements and characters from other stories from the collection, such as ‘Sherazade’ and ‘Kino’. He began to write together with the screenwriter Takamasa Oe and together they finished making this delicate chronicle about the coexistence between the living and the dead, the human need to meet the other and the healing refuge that art represents. In its international journey, the fact of adapting Murakami, the most important living author in Japan, has resulted in an important media claim, especially if we take into account that this is an independently produced film and that its budget does not exceed $1.3 million. The seal of the writer managed to transcend.
the main stage
Following the earthquake and subsequent tsunami that occurred in Tōhoku in 2011, Hamaguchi visited this Japanese region to interview various survivors. During these long journeys, the director realized the mise-en-scène involved in any car journey and its dramatic potential: the driver and passenger do not have to meet their gazes and, therefore, can say things that they would never confess to each other. to be face to face. Later, Murakami’s words made him recover this intuition and materialize it in a red Saab 900 that has become the visual motif of the film. For Hamaguchi, this car is used for the most obvious and literal (moving the characters), but also to introduce subtleties that shape the emotion. And it is that the vehicle becomes a kind of shelter for the protagonists, one where the voice of the absent still resonates through the tapes recorded by Kafuku’s wife, who died two years earlier. Coexistence for so many kilometers fosters a slow rapprochement between the playwright and the driver. The car sometimes seems to be in a limbo, on the fringes of reality, where time passes differently.
The multilingual theater
‘Drive My Car’ is a film with a play inside but that takes us back to the world of cinema. Kafuku, who is preparing the production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, selects an international cast that speaks several languages (Chinese, Tagalog, Japanese and Korean Sign Language). On stage, each actor interprets in his mother tongue while the audience reads the translated text on a screen. This linguistic diversity occurred in front of the camera and also behind it, so between takes the actors had to communicate through a team of interpreters. On a trip to the United States, when he had not yet mastered English, Hamaguchi discovered that he did not understand what they said to him, but he did understand the emotion of the person speaking to him. His approach to multilingual theater stems from that same essence, placing a group of performers who are unable to understand each other but who do recognize the meaning of the subtext.
flat reading
“The method consists of reading a text exactly as if you were reading the telephone book. No expression is allowed.” Director Jean Renoir tells actress Gisèle Braunberger in a short documentary film shot in 1968, an idea that inspired Hamaguchi to work in this particular way. Again, in this aspect the game between reality and fiction is also repeated. In preparing for the film, the actors rehearsed the script the way their characters learn Uncle Vanya’s: sitting around a table and reading his lines over and over again, internalizing the cadence of the dialogue. “Focus on the text. All you have to do is read”, Kafuku says to one of the actors from Uncle Vania.
What does this story tell us now?
At the moment, very few fictions have been interested in including the pandemic in their stories, perhaps because the cinema prefers to maintain the privilege of inhabiting another reality. Instead, the filming of this film was crossed by Covid and the virus makes a final appearance irremediably anchoring the unease of its protagonists in our time. How not to value now the connection between two people, how not to empathize with the pain of the other.
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