In Japan’s Oscar-Nominated ‘Drive My Car,’ Silence Is the Loudest Character

The central character, who quietly mourns his beloved wife’s death throughout the film, visits the childhood home of his 24-year-old driver, equally a woman of few words. The two stand surrounded by heaps of pristine white snow, each feeling the weighted pain of having lost a loved one, as the sound literally cuts out from the film. The audience is left staring at these two moving parts, who bear no similar traits apart from the universal torment that is grief. 

Between dealt words and exchanged glances, Drive My Car reminds us that silence isn’t non-communication. It’s an extension of communicating, at times far louder and more telling than words—if one has the ear to listen. 

Ahead of the 94th Academy Awards on Sunday, the film has already made history as the first Japanese movie to earn an Oscar nomination for Best Picture. If it wins this award, it'll only be the second non-English language film to have received this recognition, following South Korean thriller Parasite’s win in 2020. 

Drive my Car, which already won the prestigious Best Screenplay Award at the Cannes International Film Festival in July, also scored three other Academy Award nominations, including Best International Feature Film and Best Adapted Screenplay. The 43-year-old director Ryusuku Hamaguchi was also nominated for Best Director, making him only the third Japanese director to be selected for this recognition. 

The nearly three-hour long movie, in all its layered complexity, is an adaptation of international bestselling author Haruki Murakami’s short story, Men Without Women. The film follows the stoic actor and director Yusuke Kafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima), who lost his famous playwright wife to a brain hemorrhage two years earlier, as he’s invited to direct a stage play of Anton Chekov’s Uncle Vanya in southern Hiroshima. He decides to drive down in his treasured red Saab, only to learn that the production’s insurance bans him from driving himself. He’s assigned a driver, sullen 24-year-old Misaki (Toko Miura), who becomes a vital character who helps him—as well as herself—come to terms with lost loved ones. 

According to the film’s actors, Hamaguchi made sure the cast practiced the silence so central in the story while learning their scripts. The director made them run lines in much the same way that grieving character Yusuke directs his cast as they rehearse Uncle Vanya. 

Sonia Yuan, an actor known for her role in Chinese drama Summer’s Desire, stars as Janice Chang—the lead female actor in the play in the movie. She said lines were first rehearsed by reading them cold—without emotion and at a very slow pace. It’s repetitive and strict, Yuan said, but “through repetition and practice, we have a sort of trust and a mutual rhythm built from this process,” she told VICE. 

Given that the play in Drive My Car features multiple languages, Yuan appeared in scenes with actors who spoke languages she didn’t know, and said she would at first listen for cues that someone was finished reading their line. But after so much rehearsing, the 31-year-old felt the script was ingrained in her head—almost like subtitles. 

“By using a different language, we're forced, in a sense, to have to pay more attention and to have to listen more sincerely in order to connect with the other person,” Yuan said. 

Park Yu-rim, whose character Lee Yoo-na speaks Korean sign language, agreed that acting in a film featuring so many tongues forced actors to communicate in creative ways. “Language matters for deep conversation, but more important is the heart, I think. If you strongly want to talk to them, you will listen to them carefully,” she told VICE.

Park felt the same thing when she worked with her team for the movie. 

“All the staff tried to speak in Korean to me even though they can’t pronounce it perfectly. You know in your heart they care about you when they say ‘good morning’ in your language that they’re not familiar with,” Park said. “This shows how much they cared about me. You can tell without a word.”

Through acting with sign language, Park said she did learn to listen more carefully. “Outside of the filming sites, I didn’t understand what was being said. So I focused more on the facial expressions, the hand gestures, the tones of voice, and the moods, which I usually wouldn't pay attention to,” she said. 

For Reika Kirishima, a Japanese actor who plays Yusuke’s wife Oto, acting in the film made her realize just how expressive silence was as a form of communication.

“There’s the type of silence where, though you both understand reality, you fall quiet, or at times both choose to stay silent—there are things that can only be conveyed through this unspoken exchange,” she told VICE. 

Non-verbal communication was present in the ending too, Kirishima said, and helped her interpret the final scene. 

After we see Yusuke stage Uncle Vanya, we see his driver Misaki shopping for groceries with the director’s red Saab—one of his prized possessions of which he was protective—in Korea. Like Yusuke, Misaki feels regret from her relationship with her mother, who had abused her as a child. Kirishima interpreted this scene as Misaki being able to leave Japan, a place the character associated with great pain. As Misaki drives away, a faint smile plays at the corner of her mouth, which Kirishima said gave her hope. 

“I think the film gives people a hint as to how we should communicate with people, how we should go on living in life, despite experiencing immense grief,” she said.

In all her 23 years of acting, Kirishima said she’s never rehearsed a film so meticulously as she did Drive My Car. She felt it showed how much the director respected his cast, and wished every movie was given that much care. 

Using non-verbal communication to process grief is universal in the language of cinema, and one of the key reasons Drive My Car has become so critically acclaimed worldwide. Besides the Cannes screenplay award, the film has won numerous awards, including a BAFTA award for Best Film Not in the English Language, since its release last year.

“Each time we win or are nominated for an award, it feels like I’m experiencing a miracle—I’m more than happy already,” Kirishima said.

Kirishima hopes more Japanese films, and Asian cinema in general, get the attention they deserve. There are lots of movies of great quality, she said, but it has still been difficult to break into the international scene. “Especially as Japanese movies are filmed with a small budget, and when you have little to work with, you spend less time on the work,” she said. 

Park, who was equally shocked to learn Drive My Car had gained such international acclaim, said she initially didn’t know what to make of the awards. “But I decided to enjoy every moment and share the good news with my friends, because I don’t know when it will happen again,” she said. 

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