Japan has officially submitted their entry for Best International Feature Film for next year’s Academy Awards, and now American audiences are finally able to get their first look at the film. Sideshow and Janus Films have released the first trailer for Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s adaptation of the Haruki Murakami short story,
Drive My Car, which won the Best Screenplay and Ecumenical Jury Prizes at this year’s Cannes Film Festival, follows young stage actor and director Yusuke Mafuku (Hidetoshi Nishijima) mourning his wife’s death, who takes an offer to direct a production of Uncle Vanya to distract himself from his pain. Upon arrival, he meets Misaki Watari (Toko Miura), a young woman assigned to him as chauffeur, who bonds with him only to watch tensions rise between he and his cast, as a handsome TV star butts heads with Yusuke after learning of his unwelcome connection to his late wife. Following Yusuke as he must confront painful truths and haunting mysteries from his past, Drive My Car chronicles the bond between he and Misaki, a story “traveling a path of love, loss, acceptance, and peace”.
Directed by Hamaguchi and co-written (from the Murakami story) by Hamaguchi and Takamasa Oe, Drive My Car serves as Japan’s sixty-eighth entry for Best International Feature Film, and would serve as their seventeenth nomination if the film makes it onto the Academy’s 2022 roster. Japan has won the Academy Award four times in the past, beginning in 1951 with Akira Kurosawa’s Rashomon, and subsequently with 1954’s Gates of Hell, 1955’s Samurai, The Legend of Musashi, and 2008’s Departures.
An official selection of the New York, San Sebastian, BFI London, and Toronto International Film Festivals, Drive My Car will make its American premiere on November 24 at New York’s Film Forum and Film at Lincoln Center, before premiering in Los Angeles at Landmark’s Nuart Theater on December 3. Check out the brand new trailer below: