James Y. Lee
We can argue all we want about where Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s now-revered career as a filmmaker really took off—most will say the itinerantly Murakamian and unabashedly Chekhovian Drive My Car, or perhaps the Cannes-competing diptych of Asako I and II—but none will truly dispute the fact that with All of a Sudden, Hamaguchi has swiftly elevated himself to the privileged status of one of our most literary working filmmakers. Part of that descriptor comes from the subjects Hamaguchi has repeatedly shown an interest in, with the most obvious among them being literary adaptations, but they also include the audience-implicating dynamism of theatre, the slow-moving yet quietly impactful machinations of bureaucracy, or the power inherent in modest, spontaneous encounters that make for excellent fodder for well-equipped scribes. The 2020s in particular have proven to be a prolific decade for the Japanese filmmaker, whose prowess in unfurling gently layered tales reckoning with our place in nature—however we choose to define it—has rarely found peer or competition.
The title choice for his latest film, All of a Sudden, is several things at once. Firstly, it’s one of three titles—the others include the French title Soudain, as well as the second part of the Japanese non-fiction book’s title that the film is based on, You and I: The Illness Suddenly Gets Worse by Makiko Miyano and Maho Isono, which Hamaguchi adapted to a script alongside Léa Le Dimna. Said book is a series of 20 letters exchanged by the two authors, a terminally ill philosopher and anthropologist, respectively—crucial to the foundation of how this film dissects the effects of illness on so long life.
Secondly, it means two different things within the text of the film. It indicates how the disease afflicting one of its protagonists could rapidly deteriorate, but it also points to the serendipity through which the central duo of this film comes together. For over three hours and fifteen minutes, All of a Sudden is a culminating artistic effort from Hamaguchi that centers this duo to amass his aforementioned thematic obsessions: a parable about capitalistic exhaustion, the human dignity we owe to the dying, and intersections of cultural understanding between France and Japan, among countless other subjects that it both offers full due to and rigorously portrays.
The aforementioned central duo of protagonists, played gracefully by Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto, are Marie-Lou Fontaine and Mari Morisaki, respectively—a pair of performances so potent that both of them deservedly received the Best Actress award at this past year’s Cannes for this film. You could reasonably cleave the narrative flow of All of a Sudden into chapters, the first of which would cover Marie-Lou, who specifically serves as the director for the Garden of Freedom, an elderly care center on the edge of Paris that she wants to make radical reforms to. Formerly a psychiatric ward with a history of abuse and eventual neglect upon shuttering, Marie-Lou’s ambitions for Garden of Freedom’s reopening and transformation are noble yet personally taxing.
It’s noteworthy that the first we see of her is the sight of her asleep next to one of the center’s residents. Part of the journey she will undergo is a shifting relationship to the realm of the waking. Mari-Lou is a woman far too detached from sleep, and deliberately so, to fulfill her quest to get every staff member in the center trained in a new, real-life care process called Humanitude, which focuses on mobile, compassionate, casually oriented, and humane treatment of the elderly and care residents suffering from Alzheimer’s. While its rigorous training process is immensely costly—enough to cause controversy with the center’s nurses, led by Sophie (Marie Bunel), who’ve kept on their scrubs to delineate themselves as professionals in protest—Marie-Lou’s idealism in the long-term benefits of Humanitude is unwavering… if not thornily so to the staff and higher-level executives opposing her, and concerningly so to her friends and closest associates, such as assistant director Olivier (Jean-Charles Clichet).
The loss of a resident to a heart attack that Marie-Lou has to sleep through leads her down a very particular path, one where she boards the train in heavy mourning, and then sees an unaccompanied, young Japanese boy chasing after the train before eventually falling behind. She gets off at the next stop and tries to find him, out of curiosity. His name is Tomoki. He’s severely autistic, and two people in particular have been looking for him—his grandfather, actor Goro Kiyomiya (Kyoso Nagatsuka), as well as Mari, a theatre artist directing Goro in a one-man play premiering in the city. Silently, Marie-Lou and Tomoki sit under a tree as the rain passes them by, and when Tomoki eventually returns to Goro and Mari, Marie-Lou resolves to watch the play that the two thespians are working on for a tour, during one of her rare windows of time off.
Drive My Car fans will be delighted to find in All of a Sudden that Hamaguchi has not lost an ounce of his spark for expertly filming live theatre. As Marie-Lou steps into the theater, Hamaguchi unfurls Goro and Mari’s play, a one-man show featuring mirrors, folding chairs, and percussive instruments played by the audience, about a character’s reckoning with the place that psychiatric wards, “madhouses,” asylums, and the like have in a human species of universal abnormality and fluid definitions of “sanity.” Over the course of the play, while invoking Italian psychiatrist and disability advocate Franco Basaglia, Goro’s character wonders aloud: “Are healthy people truly alive?” The play itself is inspired, as we find in a talkback, by Goro’s own experiences looking after Tomoki, wanting to expand his understanding of the places in which we house the mentally disabled or ill, so that he can better look after Tomoki while he can.
In that same talkback, several incredible things happen in a row. We find that Marie-Lou can speak Japanese after studying in Japan and picking up the language. She uses it to ask Mari, from one “director” to another, about the bridge between the “impossible and the possible”—whether such a gap can be closed to begin with when it comes to the dire health of those around us. And then, in Japanese, obscuring the truth she’s about to reveal from the French audience, Mari confesses to Marie-Lou that she’s suffering from stage 4 cancer, and was told she has six months left to live. For her, the realm of possibility lies in the question of if she can live past what she’s about to endure. Someone cries out, “in French!” Mari is about to translate in response, and then Goro gently interrupts her. And so, Marie-Lou and Mari meet up on their own outside of the theater, touched by each other’s experiences with health and the infirm. Thus, the ensuing night they spend in profound conversation and passionate debate makes up the second chapter of All of a Sudden.
So many dexterously crafted, ostensibly unassuming things happen over the course of All of a Sudden that one might not notice them steadily accumulating in emotional power, until the moment comes when the other shoe drops—a skill he’s built up and paid off in spades over the years. Most apparent among them is the fluidity of language among Efira and Okamoto in every scene they share. Both of them are fully capable of speaking each other’s languages, and they adjust to either French or Japanese based on whose mother tongue takes priority at a particular thematic point in their conversation.
As mentioned, the move between languages is a matter of access to who they let into their dialogue. It’s particularly noteworthy, for instance, that Goro’s performance is introduced in French, then spoken in Japanese with French subtitles. And yet, after a certain point, no adjusting needs to occur between the two. Mari-Lou speaks French, Mari responds in Japanese, and the two of them carry along as though their mutual understanding is perfectly translated in their heads—an alchemical mix of languages that’s simultaneously rare to witness but also entirely (and hopefully) understandable for an observing audience.
Language represents one particular microcosm of the worlds that Marie-Lou and Mari have to offer each other. A natural extension of their mother tongues is, of course, their motherlands in Paris and Kyoto, which become the two primary settings of the film, especially as Mari’s cancer grows more severe, richly filmed in crisp digital textures and formalist, boxy framings by cinematographer Alain Guichaoua. But their worlds also include their philosophies, and their pasts, and their reasons for doing the work that they do, all of which have as much to do with memory as it does with location. A lesser filmmaker would have been content to settle with throwaway lines, sharp factoids about these characters blurted into the ether and dissolved into thin air. Here, Hamaguchi lends ample time to allow his characters to explicate their worldviews to each other beyond any shadow of a doubt, and then substantively derives and recurs motifs from them with a dramatically satisfying, naturalistic sixth sense.
What stands out most about All of a Sudden is how explicit a plea it is for a better, more idealistic world, and how it frames that plea through an unshakeable relationship with mortality. As if not content enough with leaving the specter of death looming over Marie-Lou’s work with the elderly, Mari’s cancer—as well as Goro’s interrogative play—is a younger complement and thus a deeply tragic challenge to Marie-Lou’s ideals as she helps people decades older than Mari herself. And yet, even with her waning health, Mari also brings with her an intellectually rigorous, markedly anti-capitalist artistic philosophy that lends political vocabulary to Marie-Lou’s perpetual exhaustion and growing irritability, something that allows a great fog to lift from her mind and soul. The flip side is Marie-Lou’s driven humanism and unfettered mission, which lends company to Mari in an era of great loneliness and pain, giving her a family where she has none alive or in reach, and awakening her to the artistic family she has left now with Goro and Tomoki. Thus emerges the kind of alchemical narrative mixture found in our greatest realists and naturalists—the kind of storytelling that feels like it documents the motions of actual people, while also ascribing symbolic meaning to both them and each other, placed and fitted with rigorously deliberate and regimented purpose.
Is All of a Sudden a masterwork? It may well certainly come close, if not solely by merit of the fact that it’s a film that earns its way towards hope in a world in short supply of it, and a film that asks of us to risk with intention towards a world where we can humanely care for others. Its intimate encounters and structure belie the unfathomable density of the ideas it folds into one another, and its mammoth, yet still-breezy 200-minute runtime is itself a testament to Hamaguchi’s control over cinema’s unique temporal manipulations, as well as his ability to make the staid and quotidian fascinating and layered. How much of our fates can we control and accept? How much of that control and acceptance is a good thing — not just when it comes to the ends of our lives, but also how we treat each other as we barrel down the decades? Can we pull such a thing off in the post-capitalist systems that keep us quiet, exhausted, and irritable? Hamaguchi may not have answers, but in his search for them, he seems to have stumbled upon wondrous figments of curiosity, intrigue, and interest along the journey, so rewarding in their discovery that they might as well be part of the answer themselves. How generous it is that with a film like All of a Sudden, he’s beckoned us to come along with him.’
