But he’s won over by this quiet young chauffeur named Misaki Watari, and the two of them develop this interesting, quiet friendship. He suffers a loss at the beginning of the story and ends up forming this connection with a young woman who the festival hired to drive him in his red Saab 900.

It follows a theater actor, playwright, and director named Yūsuke Kafuku as he directs an adaptation of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya for a festival in Hiroshima. Lenika Cruz: Drive My Car is based on a Murakami short story of the same title. The following transcript has been edited for length and clarity. Subscribe to The Review: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Stitcher | Pocket Casts Listen to David Sims, Shirley Li, and Lenika Cruz discuss on an episode of The Atlantic’s culture podcast The Review, where they break down Drive My Car, Haruki Murakami, and the state of international film: With international films making halting, hopeful 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 barrier of subtitles”? Despite having a script in both English and Korean, Minari was nonetheless relegated to the foreign-language category.

Minari’s nomination was controversial as a film set in Arkansas that deals with very American experiences around immigration and isolation. 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.

The recognition comes at a time of tentative hope for the future of international film. It’s also the first non-English-language film from any country selected as Best Picture by all three major American critics groups. 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. Now streaming on HBO Max and competing at the Academy Awards, it’s finding wider audiences that can experience its magic for themselves. Together, these contradictions make Drive My Car an electrifying watch, but a difficult one to properly summarize. 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. It’s a three-hour drama about grief, but the experience of watching it is breezily loose and oddly comforting. It’s a film about language, but its silences carry the most powerful moments of communication.

Haruki murakami drive my car book