OVERVIEW
In a nursing home outside Paris, its director (Virginie Efira) struggles to provide dignity-first care for the elderly amidst growing budget constraints. A chance encounter with a terminally ill Japanese theater director (Tao Okamoto) staging a humanist play pulls the two into long philosophical conversations about art, illness, and what a society owes its people. Across Paris and Kyoto, Ryusuke Hamaguchi builds his first French-language feature around the act of paying attention to another person all the way through.
BACKGROUND
Five years after Drive My Car turned him into the rare Japanese filmmaker with an Academy Award, Ryusuke Hamaguchi returns to the Croisette with a project that forced him to spend two years learning enough French to direct in it. He has said the only thing that truly moved him after the Oscar was a book of letters between a Japanese philosopher with terminal cancer and a medical anthropologist, with the bridge between the two cultures being part of what drew him in. The film was presold to 30 territories before its Cannes premiere, with award-favorite Neon taking North America.
THE REVIEW
As one expects from Hamaguchi by now, the film is dialogue-heavy, philosophically restless, and largely uninterested in conventional conflict or narrative norms. Most of its three hours and sixteen minutes are given over to long conversations between Marie-Lou and Mari, performed with extraordinary precision by Efira and Okamoto. The writing is rich and alive, tasked with holding your attention the way plot usually does, while its content boldly asks you to reconsider foundamental views of the world and leave the film a different person.
This places the film in direct continuity with Evil Does Not Exist, now transposed from a forest under threat to a care home under similar pressure. Hamaguchi again tracks how slowly and quietly a capitalist structure erodes the people working inside it, and how much energy it takes to hold on to your values amidst the personal greed the system rewards. As in his previous film, Hamaguchi holds an exceptionally generous view of the world, as he states: if illness arrives without choosing who deserves it, care should arrive the same way.
The opening hour stays close to Marie-Lou’s routine and to her fight to give the elderly people in her facility the care they need, while her growing frustration at feeling like the only one in the battle intensifies. Hamaguchi immediately reminds the audience of the quiet honor of her work when it is done right. A scene of an elderly woman, surrounded by her family, looking through old photographs of herself and being awestruck by their beauty, perhaps without realizing they are a younger version of herself, is incredibly touching. The clinic is unable to provide this care because its staff is stretched thin, and management has denied them a raise. Marie-Lou pours her energy into a corporate strategy that, even if it worked, would only ever be a palliative measure.
She has an eventful chance encounter with Mari Morisaki, a theater director living with stage 4 cancer, who remains active despite doctors telling her that “all of a sudden” her body will fail her. Mari’s play is a one-person experimental monologue performed by Goro (Kyozo Nagatsuka) about the closure of Italy’s psychiatric institutions, and it gives the two women the initial spark to begin a long conversation and a shared quest to restore dignity to those society treats as mere inconveniency.
The conversation that follows is the spine of the film. It begins outside the theater, carries through the night as they walk along the Seine, drifts into the nursing home in the small hours, ends up in the kitchen making toast and soup, then outside for a cigarette, the night folding into morning without either of them noticing. They talk about the play, about Marie-Lou’s methods and why they are failing, about Mari’s diagnosis, about democracy and the failures of capitalism. It is easy to follow along, to a point that Mari even draws her thesis on the failures of late-stage capitalism on a whiteboard. For someone who has always had a tough time in lectures, I admittedly had a tougher time keeping the attention the whole way through.
After the conversation, Mari’s health deteriorates quickly, and the two travel between Paris and Kyoto, and back to Paris again, when the film and Hamaguchi finally turn the theory it preaches into a practical demonstration. Mari is invited by Marie-Lou to spend the remainder of her days in the institution, and she accepts, turning her play into workshop sessions that become a new strategy for the clinic. It’s there that the film truly transcends. We finally get a glimpse of what Hamaguchi means, as the film goes beyond merely criticizing the system and proposing an alternative. There are deeply affecting moments involving people that need care, finally getting them, which goes beyond the elderly: tired nurses, a non-verbal autistic teenager, and literally everyone gets a piece of it.
FINAL THOUGHTS
All of a Sudden is a deeply ambitious film that makes you look at the world with different eyes and quietly fall in love with it. All the strengths from Hamaguchi’s previous work are here, alongside perhaps his biggest philosophical discussion yet. The density of that discussion is something Hamaguchi compensates for by making it more spelled out, at times to the point of lecture. Even so, it is incredible how he keeps the conversation engaging for as long as he does. The approach will not work for everyone, and it begs the question of whether a middle ground could have been found. The whiteboard scene on capitalism, in particular, becomes overly drawn out. Yet very few things warm the heart and restore your faith in the world like the sight of a group of elderly women gathering to massage the feet of tired souls.