Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden Is a Wondrous Work About Caring for One Another

(SeaPRwire) –   There is no rushing a Ryusuke Hamaguchi film. These are works you need to ease into; you experience them alongside their characters and inhabit their worlds as they unfold on screen. This holds especially true for All of a Sudden, which is screening in competition at the Cannes Film Festival this year. Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car won the Academy Award for Best International Feature in 2022, and despite its three-hour runtime, it struck a chord with a surprisingly large audience: Centered on a widowed actor who builds a close bond with the young woman hired to chauffeur him to a directing job in Nagasaki, Drive My Car felt like the perfect film for the pervasive lethargy of the late-pandemic period. Following that hit, Hamaguchi released the slightly more fiery Evil Does Not Exist in 2023, which follows a single father pushing back against a proposed “glamping” development in the forested area where he and his daughter live. That film included a lengthy town council sequence, a choice few directors could pull off as effectively as Hamaguchi. He infuses mundane, everyday details with poetic weight, creating an effect that feels almost meditative, as if slowing your pulse.

This same quality applies to All of a Sudden as well. Marking Hamaguchi’s first French-language production, the exceptional French-Belgian performer Virginie Efira stars as Marie-Lou, the manager of a senior care home on the outskirts of Paris. Marie-Lou is grappling with severe burnout. She is deeply committed to a care framework called Humanitude, which centers on building specialized communication skills and encouraging residents to stay mobile and walk regularly, to ensure every patient is treated with dignity and compassion. But both the required training and implementation of the approach are costly and time-intensive, and Marie-Lou’s facility is already under significant financial strain. Some of her staff are resigning, while others push back against her ideas, noting practically that devoting more individual attention to each patient will lengthen their daily rounds and place unfair extra pressure on the entire team.

What seems like a random coincidence — or more accurately, the outcome of a small, kind, compassionate act — brings Marie-Lou into contact with Gorô (Kyozo Nagatsuka), an elderly actor, his severely autistic teen grandson Tomoki (Kodai Kurosaki), and Mari (Tao Okamoto), an experimental theater director. Mari hands Marie-Lou a flyer for a play she has directed, a work that advocates for a more empathetic approach to supporting people living with mental illness and navigating other common life challenges. Marie-Lou is so deeply moved by the production that she initiates a lengthy, intense conversation with Mari after the show. This marks the start of a connection that runs deeper than typical friendship: Each woman reaches out to the other, as if seeking out and easing whatever unspoken distress the other may be carrying. When Marie-Lou learns Mari is terminally ill with cancer, their growing bond takes on even greater urgency.

The kinship between Marie-Lou and Mari, a form of platonic intimacy, is both intellectual and deeply spiritual: The pair enthusiastically dive into long discussions about capitalism and declining birth rates, even using whiteboard diagrams to illustrate their points, a choice that will require most viewers to exercise patience. In some respects, All of a Sudden feels less like a standard narrative film and more like a sincere act of advocacy. The care home Marie-Lou runs is a sprawling establishment, with bright, lush, well-tended grounds. All residents are dressed neatly and get plenty of time outdoors, and their family members come to visit them regularly. Some residents are non-verbal but can still smile and laugh; others make no sound at all, yet show no visible signs of unhappiness. All appear to be thriving under Marie-Lou’s care model, and their well-being improves even more when Mari, who is already quite ill by this point, moves into the facility. While staying there, she leads slightly unorthodox but highly effective workshops designed to help residents move, breathe, relax, and connect more easily with those around them: In one gently humorous sequence, a group of seniors and care staff lounge across the lawn, giving each other foot massages. If this all feels a little too idyllic to be realistic, it is worth noting that the film was mostly shot on location at an actual care facility, and many of the home’s real residents appear in the cast. The core strength of All of a Sudden lies in its core message of optimism. Why can’t we build a better system for older people, and for everyone who requires specialized care, for that matter? Sooner or later, that group will include most of us, after all. There are no simple, one-size-fits-all solutions, but prioritizing and growing our capacity for compassion is a strong starting point.

It is worth noting upfront, however, that All of a Sudden unfolds at a very deliberate pace — its total runtime is three hours and 16 minutes — and viewers will notice repeated ideas and themes, some of which may feel unnecessary. (The screenplay is loosely adapted from a collection of letters exchanged between two academics, Maho Isono and Makiko Miyano, who shared observations about illness and the fundamental human need for connection.) Right around the film’s 180-minute mark, a soft, fluffy white cat named Leo enters the story, and this unexpected jolt of lively, unpredictable energy feels like a welcome gift for many viewers. Even so, there are plenty of compelling reasons to stick with All of a Sudden through its full runtime. Lensed by cinematographer Alan Guichaoua, the film is shot with such stunning, warm lighting that it feels like a small miracle in itself: In one sequence, as two characters say what may be their final goodbye to each other, the shadow of leaves cast by the sunset against a wall acts as a quiet, visual blessing. Okamoto delivers a sharp, yet calm and peaceful performance as Mari. But it is Efira who anchors the entire film. How do you capture the inner life of an overworked care facility administrator? In All of a Sudden, Efira’s soft, ethereal beauty carries a visible weariness that fits the character perfectly. Marie-Lou is exhausted, and for all her deep devotion to the home’s residents, her energy and spark are nearly depleted. But something precious is restored to her the second she meets Mari; we can see a quiet, bright spark light up her eyes when she recognizes a kindred spirit who feels almost like her other half. To settle into All of a Sudden and experience it as it unfolds is to sync your own rhythm to these two women’s for a few hours. There are far less meaningful ways to pass your time.