Drive My Car: Ryusuke Hamaguchi's Film Joins Criterion Collection - Collider

Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s acclaimed three-hour drama, Drive My Car, will join the Criterion Collection. The film is heading into Oscars weekend with four nominations, including Best Picture and Best Director, as well as in the Best International Feature and Best Adapted Screenplay categories.

Based on a short story by Haruki Murakami, Drive My Car follows a grieving stage actor and director who takes up an offer to direct an adaptation of Uncle Vanya in Hiroshima. There, he befriends a young woman who is assigned to chauffeur him in his beloved red Saab 900, subsequently healing old wounds and readjusting to the new realities of his life.

Since 1984, The Criterion Collection has been publishing important classic and contemporary films “in editions that offer the highest technical quality and award-winning, original supplement.” At a time when the death of physical media is seen by many in the film community as an alarming reality, the Criterion Collection remains dedicated to honoring the best in international cinema with gorgeously crafted physical editions.

And Drive My Car certainly qualifies as an important modern classic. The film has been honored in the Best International Film category at the Gotham Awards, the Golden Globes, the Independent Spirit Awards, the Critics Choice Awards and the BAFTAs. It is the first Japanese film to be nominated for Best Picture, and Hamaguchi is the third Japanese director nominated for Best Director since Hiroshi Teshigahara in 1965 and Akira Kurosawa in 1985. It also became the first non-English language film to win Best Picture from all three major U.S. critics groups (LAFCA, NYFCC, NSFC).

Starring Hidetoshi Nishijima, Toko Miura, Masaki Okada and Reika Kirishima, Drive My Car premiered at the Cannes Film Festival last year, where it competed for the Palme d'Or and won three awards, including Best Screenplay. It was given a very limited theatrical release in New York City theaters by Janus Films in November, and will be available to stream in certain international territories on MUBI in April.

You can read the film’s official synopsis down below:

Two years after his wife’s unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a renowned stage actor and director, receives an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya at a theater festival in Hiroshima. There, he meets Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), a taciturn young woman assigned by the festival to chauffeur him in his beloved red Saab 900. As the production’s premiere approaches, tensions mount amongst the cast and crew, not least between Yusuke and Koshi Takatsuki, a handsome TV star who shares an unwelcome connection to Yusuke’s late wife. Forced to confront painful truths raised from his past, Yusuke begins - with the help of his driver – to face the haunting mysteries his wife left behind. Adapted from Haruki Murakami’s short story, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car is a haunting road movie traveling a path of love, loss, acceptance, and peace.