Rent Drive My Car (2021)

Long Haul - Drive My Car review by JR

With a running time of two hours and fifty-two minutes (it feels even longer!), you are in for a long haul.

It concerns a theatre director and his television screenplay writer wife. It transpires that she can only get inspiration for her writing during orgasm, so she has a lot of sex with multiple partners. One of her ideas for a drama is about a schoolgirl stalker who sneaks into a schoolboy's bedroom and masturbates on his bed and then leaves a tampon as a token of her having been there. This is wrong on so many levels... Oh, and in a previous life she was a lamprey. Just your regular TV drama...

The wife dies suddenly about one hour into the film, and oddly the cast credits appear at length. After the credits roll, the husband takes on a job of directing Chekov's Uncle Vanya. He has to accept a young woman driver provided by the theatre company. He uses the hour long commute in his car to recite Vanya's lines and listen to the play (seemingly endlessly) on cassette. We sit in on auditions and multiple long repetitive rehearsals of the play.

None of it is moving or engages the emotions; it is massively verbose, slow, long and ponderous, and full of self- importance.

Hypnotic - Drive My Car review by sb

FILM & REVIEW Had this on my watch pile for a while as it’s a slow burning character study…and 179 minutes long….and yes it is both but it’s also utterly hypnotic. In the pre- title sequence ( that’s the pre-title sequence that lasts 40 minutes) we meet Yusuki (Nishajimma) an actor and theatre director specialising in Beckett and Chekhov. He is married to Oto ( Krishima) a screen writer who tells him her ideas for stories during sex and gets him to re-tell them the next morning. She introduces him to Koji ( Okada)a handsome arrogant young actor that Yusiki discovers having sex with Oto but he leaves without them realising and nothing is said. Time passes and Oto tells him they need to talk but he delays coming home to find her dead from an anurysm. He is stricken with grief and retires from the stage. After the title sequence it’s 2 years later and he is directing Checkov’s Uncle Vanya is a small town outside Hiroshima . It’s a language blind version in that not all the actors speak Japanese - in fact one is mute and uses Korean sign language but they manage. One of the actors is Koji whose out of control behaviour has got him fired but Yusikzi hires him in the title role even though he is several decades too young. Yusiki is also assigned a young female driver Misaki (Muira) for his beloved Saab Turbo - he refuses but is told it’s part of the insurance. She is taciturn af first but over time the two form a bond as they have both lost someone and blame themselves for their inaction…. As I say it’s a real slow burner but each character fills an important role with some really touching scenes - one is when it’s discovered that the mute Korean actress is a actuality the wife of the theatre manager who didn’t want to prejudice her casting. Although it seems to be heading in a romantic direction it’s revealed that Yusiki and his wife lost a child and Misaki is the age the child would have been so it’s a much a surrogate Father /Daughter relationship with a real emotional pay-off. It looks beautiful with all the night driving with the lights gleaming off the red Saab and whilst not for everyone it’s well a watch as there is much to reward. It’s the kind of film where once all the kit is packed away you can imagine the characters just quietly getting on with their lives - quite remarkable - 5/5

Tedious cinema-emptier - Drive My Car review by Alphaville

A low-key short story turned into a low-key overlong film filled to overflowing with filler scenes. It has won awards! The DVD blurb describes its director as ‘masterful’! Have film critics lost their senses?

The slow, solemn, deliberate, nearly-3hr film begins with an unnecessary 40min domestic preamble, at the end of which the main character’s wife dies. No spoiler – the trailer covers this in a few seconds. Cut to credits... after FORTY pointless minutes that a better film would have quickly covered as backstory. Then we have another 2hrs to sit through as our man (a stage director) comes to terms with his loss while we’re subjected to endless scenes of him rehearsing Chekhov’s ‘Uncle Vanya’.

The camerawork is unremarkable and the film is so unforgivably tedious and disdainful of its audience that it deserves all the brickbats it gets.