"Drive My Car" is just art.

When I started watching Drive My Car, I have to admit I was slightly intimidated by its nearly 3-hour runtime. While I tend to follow a "make the movie last as long as it has to" philosophy, few feature films can sustain that many minutes of running time without crumbling before our eyes.

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The point is, with a nearly 40-minute prologue that started off disconcerting but gradually managed to capture our attention, Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's film won my heart. What felt like a hollow drama in which I could barely understand half of what was happening ended up being a deep and intimate story about forgiveness, death, and trying to make peace with the ghosts of our past.

While Drive My Car's script is the main reason why everything works so well, the true protagonist of the story isn't Yūsuke Kafuku or Misaki Watari, but the beautiful red Saab 900 in which a large portion of the story takes place, combined with direction that perfectly complements the film's slow-burn style.

In Drive My Car, we follow the story of a play director who has been unable to come to terms with the sudden death of his wife. After agreeing to direct a version of Uncle Vanya for a festival in Hiroshima, the play's producers assign him a young chauffeur to accompany him and drive him everywhere while he works on the play. In the process, the two forge a strong bond around their past traumas.

The reality is that there's no written premise that justifies Drive My Car, since the true soul of the film lies in the moments we share with its protagonists, moments that, while not seemingly going anywhere, gradually reveal the true spirit of its characters.

It's a film that leverages minimalism in the best possible way. Every shot, every piece of music, the cuts and the rhythm of the dialogue are surgically constructed to create a devastating experience, where we connect more and more with its characters. The length, which previously felt excessive, ultimately works in favor of the final result.

It's an introspective film, in which, ironically, we end up knowing more about ourselves than the characters we're watching: our past sins, the difficulty of forgiveness, and love as an unstoppable force in the face of adversity.

This score was taken from my Letterboxd account.