Drive My Car (Doraibu mai kâ - 2021)

I found this overlong (2:59!) story, about a Japanese theatre director/actor, his Saab with left-hand drive (as in Europe and America, even though Japan's roads are made for right-hand drive), and his driver, fascinating, even though I had to reserve an entire afternoon to watch it. Chekov's Uncle Vanya and a multi-lingual production of it in Hiroshima is central to the story and it might have served me to have some familiarity with that play.

Everything I've read discloses a cataclysmic event that happens unexpectedly a half hour into the movie, and another bit of background that's revealed much later, but I'm leaving those out. The opening credits do not run until after that event, so perhaps the opening, before the event, is supposed to be a prologue.

Hidetoshi Nishijima plays our soft spoken hero, Reika Kirishima his playwright wife, Toko Miura his even more taciturn driver, and Masaki Okada an actor in the production.

Director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi and co-writer Takamasa Oe adapted the screenplay from a short story by Haruki Murakami, and they and the movie have had tremendous acclaim (see below).

Wow, the music by Eiko Ishibashi is actually available to stream on Apple Music, and probably elsewhere. I'm enjoying it as I write.

This movie not only won the Gotham Award for Best International Feature, and is nominated in that category for Critics Choice, Spirit Awards, and the Oscar, it is also nominated for Oscars for Best Adapted Screenplay and all-around Best Picture, just as the Korean movie Parasite was in 2020.

Rotten Tomatoes' critics are in high gear, with a 98% average, while its audiences have down-shifted slightly to 82.

This isn't available to stream yet––I watched in on the Spirit Awards streaming platform a few weeks ago––but is playing in select art houses around the country.