The Oscar for Best International Feature notwithstanding, the lackluster domestic performance of Drive My Car is notable in a country where homegrown movies have been outselling American blockbusters for the last 14 years.
The last time a Japanese entry won the Oscar for best international film 13 years ago, it was something of an upset, surprising the forecasters who had barely heard of Departures, Yojiro Takita’s story about an accidental undertaker, before the ceremony.
Japanese cinema, after all, had long since faded from its mid-20th century glory, when critics and other filmmakers from around the globe celebrated directors like Akira Kurosawa, Kenji Mizoguchi, and Yasujiro Ozu as giants of world cinema.
The winner this year, Drive My Car, Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s quiet, devastating meditation on grief, art. and human connection, was the overwhelming favourite in the international category, and was also nominated for best adapted screenplay, best director, and best picture.
Hamaguchi’s Oscar win is something of a capstone to a slow-burn return of Japanese filmmakers to international acclaim. Three years ago, Hirokazu Kore-eda’s Shoplifters was also nominated in the international category at the Academy Awards after winning the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival, and Kiyoshi Kurosawa won best director at the Venice Film Festival in 2020 for Wife of a Spy.
Yet in some ways, the international success of Drive My Car derives from its transcendence of the constraints of an insular domestic film industry where most movies never make it off Japan’s shores.
Hamaguchi’s movie, based on short stories by Haruki Murakami, portrays “a Japan that is easy to accept and understand for foreigners,” said Tamaki Tsuda, a television producer and former film critic in Tokyo. The content of the film is by definition international: The main character directs a theater production of Chekhov’s Uncle…