Drive My Car

As winter begins and the nights lengthen, this film faces another across 86 years. In 1935 the question is whether a made creature may ask for a companion; here it is reversed — whether a voice left behind by someone gone can still count as presence. Neither film rushes to answer; both simply let the silence run long enough.

舞台剧演员兼导演家福悠介习惯在开车时听妻子音录下的磁带背台词。两年后，他到广岛接受驻留，执导一版多语言的《万尼亚舅舅》：演员各用自己的母语演出，其中一位以韩国手语表演；戏剧节出于保险规定，要求由专人驾驶他的红色 Saab，司机是话很少的渡利美咲。排练场与往返车程，构成了这部 179 分钟电影几乎全部的空间。

It turned a three-hour art-house drama into one of the most discussed films of its year. At Cannes in 2021 it won three awards including Best Screenplay; it later took the Academy Award for Best International Feature at the 94th Oscars and the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Language Film. Rotten Tomatoes records 97% approval from 217 reviews, while Metacritic found it on 89 critics' top-ten lists for 2021, more than any other foreign-language film that year. In 2025 the Busan International Film Festival's Asian Cinema 100 named it Ryusuke Hamaguchi's signature work. The real audacity is its rhythm: a long opening lays out what a husband and wife never said to each other, and the rest lets a car, a cassette and a multilingual Uncle Vanya read those things back. Because the actors perform in their own languages, one of them in Korean Sign Language, lines often cannot be understood — only watched. Understanding another person is moved out of semantics and back into time and attention.