Drive my Car, which already won the prestigious Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes International Film Festival in July, also scored three other Academy Award nominations, including Best International Feature Film and Best Adapted Screenplay. The 43-year-old director Ryusuku Hamaguchi was also nominated for Best Director, making him only the third Japanese director to be selected for this recognition. The nearly three-hour long movie, in all its layered complexity, is an adaptation of international bestselling author Haruki Murakami’s short story, Men Without Women. The film follows the stoic actor and director Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), who lost his famous playwright wife to a brain hemorrhage two years earlier, as he’s invited to direct a stage play of Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya in southern Hiroshima. He decides to drive down in his treasured red Saab, only to learn that the production’s insurance bans him from driving himself. He’s assigned a driver, sullen 24-year-old Misaki (Toko Miura), who becomes a vital character who helps him—as well as herself—come to terms with lost loved ones.“Drive My Car reminds us that silence isn’t non-communication. It’s an extension of communicating, at times far louder and more telling than words—if one has the ear to listen.”
“By using a different language, we're forced, in a sense, to have to pay more attention and to have to listen more sincerely in order to connect with the other person.”
Park felt the same thing when she worked with her team for the movie. “All the staff tried to speak in Korean to me even though they can’t pronounce it perfectly. You know in your heart they care about you when they say ‘good morning’ in your language that they’re not familiar with,” Park said. “This shows how much they cared about me. You can tell without a word.”Through acting with sign language, Park said she did learn to listen more carefully. “Outside of the filming sites, I didn’t understand what was being said. So I focused more on the facial expressions, the hand gestures, the tones of voice, and the moods, which I usually wouldn't pay attention to,” she said.“Language matters for deep conversation, but more important is the heart, I think.”
Non-verbal communication was present in the ending too, Kirishima said, and helped her interpret the final scene. After we see Yusuke stage Uncle Vanya, we see his driver Misaki shopping for groceries with the director’s red Saab—one of his prized possessions of which he was protective—in Korea. Like Yusuke, Misaki feels regret from her relationship with her mother, who had abused her as a child. Kirishima interpreted this scene as Misaki being able to leave Japan, a place the character associated with great pain. As Misaki drives away, a faint smile plays at the corner of her mouth, which Kirishima said gave her hope. “I think the film gives people a hint as to how we should communicate with people, how we should go on living in life, despite experiencing immense grief,” she said.In all her 23 years of acting, Kirishima said she’s never rehearsed a film so meticulously as she did Drive My Car. She felt it showed how much the director respected his cast, and wished every movie was given that much care. Using non-verbal communication to process grief is universal in the language of cinema, and one of the key reasons Drive My Car has become so critically acclaimed worldwide. Besides the Cannes screenplay award, the film has won numerous awards, including a BAFTA award for Best Film Not in the English Language, since its release last year.“There’s the type of silence where, though you both understand reality, you fall quiet, or at times both choose to stay silent—there are things that can only be conveyed through this unspoken exchange.”