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Movie of the Week #2 - Drive My Car (2021)
This is the second movie we discuss of Academy Award Winners. It also won for Best Foreign Language Film and was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Feel free to add any thoughts, opinions, reflections, analysis or whatever comments related to this film.
The rest of the schedule is:
- 13th of November: L.A. Confidential
- 20th of November: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
- 27th of November: West Side Story
So I didn't do the last one (my bad) but I'm also not a big fan of Truffaut or any of the French New Wave really.
So I saw Drive My Car in early 2022. I saw it the day of Oscar nominations, because it was the only Best Picture nominee I hadn't seen. I knew it was possible that it would get into Picture but I was hesitant on it because it's a slow burn three hour film.
I'm not an art-house guy, in reality. My favorite films of all time are largely studio films, my end of the year list always mostly consists of studio films. So sitting through this was kind of rough, it took me nearly a whole day to watch it.
I can appreciate it for what it is, but it was not something I actively enjoyed watching, nor is it something I ever plan on watching it again. When a film's opening credits only comes up forty minutes into the movie, you know it's a real test of patience.
Out of all the Picture nominees that year, I would rank it probably second to last (with CODA being at the bottom). I had it above The Power of the Dog during the Oscar season, but thinking about it again, I think Power of the Dog is a lot more entertaining and a lot more cinematic even if I thought it was overrated at the time.
For those curious about my rankings of Picture nominees that year, it would be: West Side Story, Licorice Pizza, Don't Look Up, Belfast, Nightmare Alley, King Richard, Dune, The Power of the Dog, Drive My Car, CODA.
One interesting thing about this movie though, is that apparently, a lot of the Cannes jury wanted this to win the Palme. But, Spike Lee, the president of the Jury that year, refused to give it the top prize. He wanted A Hero to get Palme. But comprises were made, giving Drive My Car the screenplay award and Titane the Palme.
I watched about half last night and hope to complete it tonight. The first 40 minute "intro" completely failed to grab me. It has now gotten more interesting and I can see why the film needs to establish some backstory, but it could have been trimmed way down.
Interesting info the Cannes jury. I think I like this more than Titane already, but I am in the minority of not liking that movie. It might have general wider appeal than Drive My Car though, because Titane is just so batshit crazy and more entertaining in a bizarre way.
I'm not sure if there is a minority. It's a pretty polarizing film. I'm certainly not a fan of it.
I wasn't a fan of much of the Cannes line-up that year, with Worst Person in the World probably being my favorite of the major players (and even then I still felt it overrated by a bunch of 30-somethings that related to the story).
Speaking of Titane, there was a wide expectation that France would choose Happening, which won the Golden Lion at Venice, for their Oscar submission. Surprisingly though they chose Titane, which wasn't even shortlisted for the Oscar. Similar to this year how there was a wide expectation that they would choose Anatomy of a Fall. It's kind of strange that they chose the Palme winner when it was a weird and non-crowdpleasing film, but didn't choose it when it was a simple thriller.
You are probably right. I was just going by that only 15% of Letterboxd users have given it lower than 3 stars. But even though I usually find Letterboxd ratings better than IMDb, the Letterboxd crowd still seem to have a type of film they really like.
Yeah letterboxd likes camp. Especially when it's directed by a woman.
I'm surprised how well this film contrasts with last week's film, Day for Night (1973). Both films have a text within the text (the story within the story) which is acted out by actors and directed by directors.
And both films are trying to get us to think about how we consume and reproduce media. How we select media and how our choices affect us. Drive My Car (2021) is certainly a bit better at this and it is asking more questions.
Some non-questions:
In a way, Day for Night (1973) became the movie that it was filming: the movie inside the movie. Drive My Car (2021) likewise became Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot (1953). The meta-movie and the movie are both text. And text is flat. It can be interwoven, but it still maintains flatness. It's up to the reader or the watcher to interpret and weigh meta-text against text.
It's interesting that Waiting for Godot is an absurdist play, or at least seen as one. Last week I said that Day for Night is a film about the absurdity of filmmaking; and I still think that is true. Certainly, Drive My Car has moments of absurdity: walking in on a cheating wife, driving one hour away to a hotel every day, half-believing that you killed a loved one through inaction; but all of these things can be rationalized, if not part of every day life.
Maybe some people ignore the movie within the movie but the movie within the movie still provides a vehicle for the "actors" to process their emotions. It provides a flavour for the enclosing story. And perhaps too the movie as a whole colours our own lives. A life is its own enclosing story and we are all actors inside this hell-home we call Synecdoche, New York (2008).
But this all begs the question, who is driving the car? Am I driving my car? Is Samuel Beckett driving my car? Is Haruki Murakami driving my car? Is Ryusuke Hamaguchi driving my car? Is Misaki Watari driving my car? Is Toko Miura driving my car? Kafuku is not driving my car because he has Glaucoma but maybe Nishijima does not have Glaucoma, and maybe Glaucoma is just a plot device. Oops... line please!
First of all - that gorgeous red classic Saab! My father had a Saab when I grew up, not a fancy red one like this, but still - underrated car brand.
As I said in another comment, I really struggled with the 40 minute "intro". There needs to be something to establish his life before his loss, but I didn't feel like it warranted 40 minutes of runtime for that. The movie did improve after that though once the narrative about the play and his relationship with the driver opened things up.
I generally really liked the script and its themes with intertwining a stage play and real life, how actors and artists uses the words written by others to deal with personal things. I found it interesting that the play was performed in multiple languages - including sign language. Not entirely sure what was supposed to convey with relation to the rest of the film though and I am sure I am missing some important elements by not being familiar with the plays in question here.
The framing of this story reminded me of one of my favorite films, Blue by Kieslowski. It has a similar theme about dealing with loss through artistic expression. But somehow this movie never really took off for me, even though it on paper has the elements for something great. I felt it lacked something in the cinematography and the performances. It looks good, but also somewhat sterile and flat. It is very neutral in its shots, and when the acting is also very restrained and introspective, there was little for me to work with. The director even says something to his own actors that captures what I felt was lacking, about there is clearly something going on between the characters but it also needs to reach the audience. It never got there for me.
Maybe there is some cultural and language barrier at work here, though I have several Wong Kar-wai movies that fully got under my skin, so there are other things that is keeping me from fully engaging with Drive My Car. It makes sense it has resonated well with the Oscar Academy in how it deals with actors and artists, but similar to how I felt about Day For Night, I don't live in that kind of world and since most of this is played a very introspective way, it didn't become a proper insight into that world.
In conclusion, I did find the film worth watching as it got over my threshold for not finding it a waste of time. But only just, and it might have been a great 2 hour film if the script was handled differently - because the script is great.