You can’t rush a Ryusuke Hamaguchi movie. These are pictures you need to settle into; you live with them and in them as they unspool before you. That’s certainly true of All of a Sudden, playing in competition here at the Cannes Film Festival. Hamaguchi’s Drive My Car won the Oscar for Best International Feature in 2022, and considering its three-hour runtime, it seemed to chime with a fairly large number of viewers: The story of a widowed actor who forms a bond with the young woman who’s been hired to drive him to a directing gig in Nagasaki, Drive My Car was perhaps the perfect movie for our late-pandemic listlessness. Hamaguchi followed the success of that picture in 2023 with the somewhat feistier Evil Does Not Exist, about a single father fighting a planned “glamping” site in the forest area he and his daughter call home. That movie featured an extended town-council meeting, but that’s the sort of thing Hamaguchi can pull off. He makes mundane details feel poetic, in a way that seems to slow the heartbeat.
That’s more or less true of All of a Sudden as well. In Hamaguchi’s first French-language picture, the marvelous French-Belgian actor Virginie Efira stars as Marie-Lou, the director of a care home for the elderly on the outskirts of Paris. Marie-Lou is facing serious burnout. She’s devoted to a practice known as Humanitude, which relies on cultivating special communication skills, as well as getting individuals up and walking, to ensure that each patient is treated with care and respect. But both the training and the implementation are costly and time-consuming, and Marie-Lou’s facility is struggling as it is. Members of her staff are leaving; others are simply resistant to her ideas, noting, pragmatically, that the intensified focus on each patient will slow down their rounds and place undue pressure on the staff as a whole.
By chance—or, more accurately, as the result of an act of kindness and compassion—Marie-Lou meets an elderly actor, Gorô (Kyozo Nagatsuka), his teenage grandson Tomoki (Kodai Kurosaki), who is severely autistic, and an experimental-theater director named Mari (Tao Okamoto). Mari gives Marie-Lou a flier for the play she’s directed, a work that argues for a more empathetic approach to treating mental illness and other basic life challenges. Marie-Lou is so moved by the play that she strikes up an intense conversation with Mari afterward. This is the beginning of a bond that’s somehow deeper than friendship: Each woman reaches out toward the other, as if to locate and soothe whatever distress might be roiling there. Marie-Lou learns that Mari is dying of cancer, which lends their friendship even more urgency.
Marie and Mari’s kinship, a kind of intimacy without eroticism, is cerebral as well as spiritual: the two eagerly engage in long discussions about capitalism and falling birthrates—complete with whiteboard diagrams—which will demand patience from most viewers. In some ways, All of a Sudden feels more like a heartfelt act of advocacy than a mere movie. The care home Marie-Lou runs is a sprawling establishment, with lush, cheerful grounds. The patients are all neatly dressed and get to spend lots of time outside. Their relatives come to visit them. Some are silent but able to smile and laugh; others make no sound at all, but do not appear to be unhappy. All seem to be benefiting from Marie-Lou’s approach to their care, and they do even better when Mari, at this point seriously ill, comes to stay at the facility, where she runs slightly unorthodox yet effective workshops designed to help patients move and breathe and relax, as well as better relate to one another: in one gently comic scene, a jumble of seniors and caregivers loll on the lawn, giving one another foot massages. If it all seems a bit too idyllic to be realistic, it’s worth noting that the film was largely shot on the premises of a real care facility, and features the participation of many of its residents. The core strength of All of a Sudden is that it’s an expression of optimism. Why can’t we make things better than they are, for the aging and for everyone, particularly those needing special care? After all, at some point that will be most of us. There are no simple solutions, but cultivating compassion is a good beginning.
But again, be forewarned: much of All of a Sudden is slow-going—the runtime is three hours and 16 minutes—and you’ll notice repetition of certain ideas and themes, much of it perhaps unnecessary. (The script was loosely adapted from a book of collected letters exchanged by two academics, Maho Isono and Makiko Miyano, who shared observations about illness and the need for human connection.) Around the movie’s 180-minute mark, a silky white cat named Leo appears on the scene, and this sudden burst of unpredictable energy might feel like a blessing. Still, there are good reasons to stick with All of a Sudden. Shot by Alan Guichaoua, the film is so beautifully lit that it’s practically an act of wonder: in one scene, as two characters bid one another goodbye for perhaps the last time, the sunset tracery of leaves against a wall serve as a visual benediction. As Mari, Okamoto is an alert yet serene presence. But Efira carries the movie. How do you capture the soul of a stressed-out administrator? In All of a Sudden, there’s something careworn about Efira’s lunar beauty. Marie-Lou is tired, and though she cares deeply for the residents of her facility, she’s running out of glow power. But something precious is restored to her the moment she meets Mari; we a gentle lightning flash in her eyes as she recognizes a soul that may as well be her twin. To live with, and in, All of a Sudden is to match heartbeats with these two women for a few hours. There are worse ways to spend your time.
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