The end of January is the time of the Gothenburg Film Festival. It is a great joy to hang out with friends, see and discuss films together and to enjoy filmmaking from countries I normally have little access to, like this time from Egypt, Jordan, Costa Rica, Lithuania and Georgia. This year’s festival, the 45th was conducted as a hybrid event, both in the cinema with limited audience as well as a digital selection of films. It gave me the chance to catch up with some of the films of 2021 that I had not had the chance to watch yet. Two of them that I particularly cared about should definitely have taken a prominent place on the My Best Films of 2021 that I earlier posted.

The two films that keep me thinking, even a week after the ending of the festival are:

• Drive My Car (2021) by the Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi

In an earlier posting I introduced Hamaguchi as someone growing into a prominent carrier of the Japanese film tradition of humane story-telling. With his film Drive My Car he has definitely established his place in this renowned list of directors. The film just received Oscar nominations for best picture, best international film, best director and best screenplay. This is a mysterious, beautiful and gripping story with depth and great originality that should not be missed. It is an adaptation of a short story by Haruki Murakami. Another impressive film with the same origine is Chang-dong Lee’s Burning, of which I have written before.

Drive My Car is a story of grief, loss and loneliness aggravated by repressed emotions. The protagonist is the theater director and actor Yusuke. He has lost his wife and artistic partner Oto to a brain hemorrhage. Two years later he is invited to set up an experimental production of Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya at a theatre festival in Hiroshima. His rehearsal style and techniques are fascinating and made me think a lot on how text works and impacts. One of his ways of preparing is to listen over and over again in his car to tapes with the text spoken by his late wife.

He is assigned a driver for the duration of the play. The driver, Misaki, is a young, silent girl, who shows to be reliable but acts very unengaged. Misaki has a painful secret buried as well. The slowly growing bond between Yusuke and Misaki, two people with emotional scars and hurts, is at the center of the film. It allows them to open up to one another, in one’s own way at one’s own time, and to help each other to come to terms with what has happened in their lives and to move on. And the last twenty minutes are emotionally so powerful, making you increasingly aware that you just may have seen the best film of the year!

• What Do We See When We Look at the Sky? (2021) by the Georgian film director Aleksandre Koberidze

More of a challenge to watch, but equally affecting and reflective is the second feature film of Alexandre Koberidze What do we see when we look at the sky? The film opens with a chance encounter between two strangers, Lisa, a pharmacist, and Giorgi, a soccer player. They decide that fate has called them to a date. Then the story turns to magic, when they wake up the next day, the day of their date, with changed appearances and having lost their job skills. Both enter into quite boring jobs, not far from each other, but completely unaware that the other is the person of the date.

With the help of the director’s own narrative voice the perspective broadens then and we are guided away from the immediate with long takes of nature, children, dogs, the city, all the time nudging us to look deeper and to pay attention to the beauty all around us. What do we see when we look deeper and do not just get lost in the mundane, everyday events? He makes us see that everything around us has so much more to offer than we usually take time to see. As if Koberidze wants to point out that this relationship, like any, has little future if we only get engrossed in the immediate and do not learn to stop, look, behold and transform?

Rinus, Feb 2022