Drive My Car: A Very Long Ride

This Japanese film is one of the favorites to win the AA for Best International Feature Film as well as Best Picture, but I didn't like it nearly as much as the critics did.  I thought its three-hour length was about one hour too long.  Also, I didn't find the relationships between the four main characters especially interesting or having sufficient depth to justify the movie's length.  Amazingly, this three-hour film is adapted from a short story by Haruki Murakami. Yusuke Kafuka (Hidetoshi Nishijima) is a successful Director who is married to actress-turned-screenwriter Oto (Reika Kirishima).  Oto gets the inspirations for her stories right after sex.  Their marriage is conflictual, at least for Yusuke (for reasons I won't disclose).  A personal tragedy occurs for Yusuke, and, two years later, he travels to Hiroshima in order to direct Anton Chekov's classic play, "Uncle Vanya."  This version of the play will be unusual in that the international cast will be saying their lines in their own languages, including even sign language.  (At least 30 minutes of the film entails the actors sitting around a big table reading their lines, which I found quite boring.) Yusuke lives about an hour away from where the play is being rehearsed, and, due to liability reasons, he must have a driver.  He doesn't like it, but reluctantly agrees to having one: Misaki (Toko Miura).  Misaki doesn't say hardly anything on the drives, since Yusuke listens to the play's lines on the car's cassette player.  Misaki is also a woman of very few words (who we learn later has her own unresolved demons).  Yusuke also develops a complex relationship with the play's star, Koji (Masaki Okada). The main characters gradually reveal who they are and their relationships unfold at a leisurely pace, but, after the three hours, there were still a number of disturbingly-loose ends.  The film needs to be seen, since it has received universal acclaim, but I just didn't get it.  (I thought that maybe it somehow paralleled "Uncle Vanya," but I read the plot of the play on Wikipedia, and it didn't seem to have anything to do with that of the movie.) Robin liked the movie much more than I did, so I don't want to "drive you away" from seeing it, but it's not for everybody.