"Shall I play the tape"

Drive My Car is a film that massivly caught me off guard by its humanity and its statements on how different people deal with pain, but also how that pain is turning them into more complicated human beings. We have hurt; we have all been hurt. Still so many things come from that hurt - messy things - that we also have to deal with, and sometimes we have no clue what to do with it or where to put it.

It's able to meditate on these ideas spectacularly with its central piece, the 1998 Saab 900 Turbo. A car that adds so much character to the film with its shiney and sleek appearance and weirdly intimate interior. Some of my favorite scenes of Drive My Car weren't its big character moments, or big story scenes, but it was when Yusuke and Misaki calmly commute through the streets of Hiroshima that I was able to digest these moments with these characters that I found myself really loving Drive My Car. It's meditative, contemplative, and it allows it allows the film ideas to steep before evolving more and more as the film goes on. The film breathes a whole different kind of life in these kinds of moments.

Ryusuke Hamaguchi's direction here is just fantastic. The way he uses international theater as a gateway to display his themes of shared pain and experiences is really touching, but his use of actors in their scenery and his fantastic editing, just makes this one of my favorite directed movies from last year.

I feel like I'll have more things to say after my inevitable rewatch of Drive My Car, but it's just a spectacular film thats emotionally satisfying, thematically rich, and just absolutely enmamoring and near intoxicating to watch. One of 2021's more essential films.