Old Saab shares limelight as 'Drive My Car' wins Oscar award for best international film

LOS ANGELES: The emotional epic from Japan "Drive My Car” won the Academy Award for best international feature film Sunday night.

Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi's film became the fifth from Japan to win the Oscar, the first since "Departures” in 2008.

The win for the three-hour journey through grief, connection and art also relied heavily on  an old Saab 900 Turbo, where much of the character development took place. The iconic Saab 900 was avantgarde for its time and was in production from 1978 to 1994.

Although the original story on which the film was based used a yellow 900 Cabrio, a red Saab was chosen as the director wanted a bolder colour to set it off against a Hiroshima backdrop that spans several seasons.

The awards night spawned its own mini-drama when Hamaguchi took the stage at the Dolby Theatre to accept it. He paused for applause, and the show’s director then started the music to cue him to leave the stage, but he objected.

"I’d like to thank all the members of the academy for having us here,” Hamaguchi said, then thanked the distributors of the film for bringing it to the United States.

"Just a moment," he said, to laughs from the audience. He then thanked his actors, "especially Toko Miura, who drove the red Saab 900 beautifully in the film," and paused again for applause.


Another musical cue followed, and Hamaguchi tried to restart yet again, but he was led off stage.

Many on social media decried what they regarded as the disrespectful treatment of the director in the moment.

With four Oscar nominations, including the first best picture nomination for a Japanese film, and several early wins in awards season that made it appear to be a best picture frontrunner, no one was surprised by Sunday's win for "Drive My Car.”

But it beat a strong field of critics' favourites and crowd pleasers, including Italy’s "The Hand of God,” Denmark’s "Flee,” Bhutan’s "Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom," and Norway's "The Worst Person in the World,” which some observers predicted might pull of an upset.

"Drive My Car" based on a short story from novelist Haruki Murakami, centres on a theater actor, Yûsuke Kafuku, played by Hidetoshi Nishijima, directing a multilingual production of Chekhov’s "Uncle Vanya.”

Still mourning the death of his wife, Kafuku leads the cast in rehearsals where the actors sit and read their lines flatly, ingesting the language for days before acting it out.