Hamaguchi’s beautiful mediation on life and death rewards the patient viewer with refreshingly resonant reasons to celebrate being alive.
Life can often feel intense in our seriously fractured and hate fuelled world but All of a Sudden, Japanese auteur Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ninth feature suggests there’s ample complex beauty within the struggle. Using many similar themes from Drive My Car the film creeps up on you with its laser-like precision and lived-in performances to deliver a real knockout to stir the soul.
Winning a joint best actress award at Cannes for their performances the film centres on an almost intrinsic connection and blossoming friendship between two women both at crossroads in their lives. Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) is the director of a for profit nursing home specialising in people with dementia in Paris. She is fiercely committed to her job and fatally independent, often filling in for absences and trying and failing to increase support for the home while rich directors won’t budge on a pay cut to make this all possible. She’s a woman with the world on her shoulders and a loss of perspective on her own life effortlessly carried by an incredible and ever changing Efira who manages to feel open, caring and incredibly closed-off all at once.
In the spark that lights the flame for the film’s central chance encounter Marie-Lou notices a young boy running alongside her tram home. On a whim and suspecting he’s been separated from his parents she gets off the tram and finds him. This is Tomoki (Kodai Kurosaki), a severely autistic young boy who is eventually found by his grandfather, actor Gorō Kiyomiya (Kyōzō Nagatsuka) and the woman directing him in a local play Mari (Tao Okamoto). There’s an elegant and palpable energy to the air when the women first meet and Mari ends up inviting Marie-Lou to the play. After she attends and is subsequently moved they share a connection during a Q&A in which Mari reveals, in Japanese, she has terminal cancer, thus beginning a beautiful and life defining friendship.
The title All of a Sudden speaks to the idea of these two women coming into each other’s lives at the exact right time. Just as all of a sudden Mari could suddenly worsen and deteriorate in a matter of weeks you never know what life may throw at you. There’s nothing divine about the circumstance but instead a fresh and realistic understanding that sometimes life is really good but it can also be really cruel. These are two good people thrown off course by unfortunate events but there’s retribution in their obvious kind hearts and deep rooted morality.
The film has a staggering 197 minute runtime and plays out at a glacial, ponderous pace structured through countless walk and talks and genuinely profound conversations. There’s a brilliant dissection of capitalism from Mari that stands to offer a reason as to why the world grinds down the average person and turns us all into time obsessed machines. Okamoto is astonishingly vulnerable as she radiates kindness and positivity, even in the face of such dire health complications. There’s a real admirable quality to Mari who seems to add to the lives of anyone who comes within her orbit, which in turn opens Marie-Lou’s eyes to the repetitive and soulless grind of her work and existence.
Hamaguchi has always been a filmmaker that takes his time and the film is initially hard to adapt to. The rhythm is so carefully paced that it does slightly drag in earlier sections but once you get on his wavelength it’s a soothing, relaxing hypnosis of a brain massage. There’s careful consideration and a gentle approach to the amazingly diverse cast of characters in the nursing home. From grumpy older nurse Sophie (Marie Bunel), to young aspiring rapper Djibril (Gabriel Dahmani) and the countless dementia patients, each person gets a chance to shine. There’s a sensitive agency and autonomy not often seen in surrounding characters that makes them all feel fully rounded and multifaceted. It’s the type of film that will make you want to turn to the person next to you and ask them all about their life.
Is it fleeting, human moments that create the idea of home within us or is it the place we were born? Maybe where we lived the longest? As a French, Belgian, Japanese co-production there’s great emphasis on the beautiful surroundings of Parisian nightlife and a visit to the stunning Japanese countryside with barely a human in walking distance acting as intersecting echoes of each other. Our culture of course leaves an imprint on us but there’s a profound feeling that it is the world and all of the different people in this world working together as one that provides meaning.
4 / 5
In its cyclical, philosophical and hugely emotional last moments All of a Sudden affirms both our human existence and Hamaguchi’s status as one of our best working directors today.
