Ryūsuke Hamaguchi's Drive My Car (2021)

I don't watch non-English or non-Francophone films a great deal, so for me to spend three hours on a Japanese film is irregular. But then, this is a superlative film, quite entrancing. It's an adaptation of Haruki Murakami's short story of the same name. Forty-seven-year-old Yūsuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), a famous actor and theatre director, has to be driven to the theatre for rehearsal of Chekhov's Uncle Vanya by Misaki Watari (Tōko Miura), a twenty-three year woman. She waits outside while he interviews the multi-lingual actors for audition, and while the rehearsals take place.

There is, and there couldn't really be anyway, much action. The important things mainly take place in the car. Here, the actions are largely between the director and the driver, as they learn about each other, and how to process their similar experiences of grief, how they learn to live and/or to re-live. I'm not one for applauding awards, but this film deserves what it receives.