THE STORY – The director of a nursing home in the Parisian suburbs attempts to introduce a humane care technique known as Humanitude, in spite of resistance. Her life is changed when she meets a terminally ill Japanese playwright named Mari Morisaki.
THE CAST – Virginie Efira, Tao Okamoto, Kodai Kurosaki & Kyōzō Nagatsuka
THE TEAM – Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Director/Writer) & Léa Le Dimna (Writer)
THE RUNNING TIME – 196 Minutes
With his 2021 film “Drive My Car,” Japanese filmmaker Ryusuke Hamaguchi achieved international stardom amongst film lovers. That powerful epic explored ideas of grief and legacy across nearly three hours. His latest, “All of a Sudden,” acts as an escalation of those achievements in almost every way, with meditations on those same topics and more, not to mention a longer runtime of over three hours and 15 minutes. It’s an undeniably daunting piece of art, with nearly every one of its many many seconds packed to the brim with insightful ideas and intellectual musings. But those with an allergy to cinematic vegetable spreads need not fear. As with “Drive My Car,” the magic trick of “All of a Sudden” is its incredibly sneaky emotional impact. Ultimately, the prolonged runtime serves to acclimate viewers to its unhurried pace in a way that hides the hearts-only house of cards that it’s quietly building, before purposefully letting it tumble down in beautifully devastating fashion.
Although long, the film is precisely focused in its execution, centering entirely around two women: Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) and Mari (Tao Okamoto). In fact, the vast majority of the film consists of long-form conversations between the two unlikely friends. They meet by total coincidence: one day, while riding the train home in Paris, Marie-Lou spies a young man running alongside the train with total abandon. Concerned for his well-being, she approaches him and sees that he’s clearly autistic and non-verbal. Being trained in caretaking as the director of a nursing home, she stays with the young man named Tomoki (Kodai Kurosaki) until his guardian, his grandfather Gorô (Kyōzō Nagatsuka), arrives. Gorô is an actor currently starring in a play directed by Mari. Her interest piqued, Marie-Lou attends the play and afterward, she and Mari engage in the first of several very long, very expansive chats.
Both of the women are fluent in both Japanese and French, and their conversations flow between the two languages with total ease. But that’s not the only unusual link that they share. There’s their similar names, plus the parallel paths that they took with their education. Marie-Lou studied in Japan while Mari spent time learning philosophy at the Sorbonne. And their cerebral alignment is clear from their very first meeting. These are two people who’ve clearly done a great deal of self-examination, with Mari’s existential awareness and willingness to expound on her inner life partially owing to the fact that she faces a stage four cancer diagnosis.
Mari’s grim prospects haven’t switched her into a frenzied “final hurrah” mode. Instead, she’s come to value life’s simple beauty, least of all humanity’s ability to look at and muse on our own inherently limited existence. She’s fearless, but not reckless. And she’s unafraid to share her thoughts with Marie-Lou, who clearly craves a companion like Mari with whom she can dive into deep talking points. In one scene that may prove to be a dividing line for some viewers, Mari literally wheels out a whiteboard in order to give Marie-Lou what’s essentially a one-on-one lecture on capitalism, nature, and the ways that the former destroys the latter while, paradoxically, requiring it in order to expand and perpetuate. It’s almost a parody of what most people might imagine art house films (or indeed, any type of art that they deem “pretentious”) to contain. But it’s an important, well-rendered scene, and the ideas that Mari lays out amazingly make the film’s tear-jerker of a final chapter even more impactful. As with all great philosophizing, political or otherwise, the theory laid out is beautiful, pointing to mankind’s powerful potential.
Through Mari, Hamaguchi and co-writer Léa Le Dimna extrapolate on the notion that our modern world is antithetical not just to nature’s ways in the external sense, but also to our internal state of being as humans. The constant drive for increased production, aiming at an impossible end goal, robs us of the free time that we need in order to rest, think, and make meaningful connections – capabilities that are some of the most wonderful gifts we’re given by being born. In that way, “All of a Sudden” is a plea for all of us to slow down, to move away from the isolating ways of competition, and to accept our shared existence both for its potential and for its finiteness. It’s a lesson that the overworked, sleepless Marie-Lou desperately needs to learn, and likely, so too does much of the film’s audience. Spending three-plus hours with a meditative film that seeks to spread a message of introspection and patience is an almost-self-aware implementation of this idea, as if with the film, Hamaguchi forces us to briefly consider our lives as deeply as Mari does. But don’t worry, although the film is dense, it’s not entirely self-serious. One of Mari and Marie-Lou’s philosophical conversations is abruptly ended by a bird shitting on both of their heads, as if to say that, for all of humanity’s analytical meditations, nature will always have the final word.
Okamoto proves to be more than capable of effortlessly delivering the script’s ultra-wordy dialogue. But, as with the movie itself, her performance is a beautiful mix of apparent intellect and emotional ability. She and Efira achieve a kind of symbiosis in their performances, gliding along the highway of the screenplay without hitting a single bump. To extend, or mix, the metaphor, they feel like a pair of experienced pilots flying as a team with ease. And much like pilots in our real world, just because the two characters have only met right before the proverbial take-off that their meeting represents doesn’t mean that their lack of familiarity stands in the way of their harmonious cooperation. Owing to the less grounded nature of her character, Efira gets to play some more obvious externalized emotions, but she manages to never rise above the movie’s decidedly gentle tone. Mari is more even-keeled and unchanging, which may make her seem like a thin character, but her steady perspective is clearly, and perhaps strangely, thanks to her disease. She’s already made peace with so much in her life, and for her to suddenly muse on, say, childhood difficulties or past heartbreak would feel like a waste of time, both for and by her character.
Hamaguchi constructs a cinematic world for his characters defined by a calm, tender energy, additionally complemented by the gorgeously deliberate, expertly composed cinematography. The near-lethargic pace allows for the newly founded pair’s conversations to carry on without feeling like they’re speeding toward a conclusion just for the sake of hurrying the film along. It’s not an easy task, insomuch as the act of watching a movie can be considered difficult, but the rewards are vast for those who not only stick with the film to the end but align themselves with its rhythms, letting it wash over them.
The title “All of a Sudden” proves to be accurate with regard to the film’s ultimate impact. To give into the long, slow film is the cinematic equivalent of floating in a tranquil lake before suddenly being struck by lightning. Such is the way that the film’s final chapter hits, and without the many minutes of cerebrally challenging conversations that come before, the effect wouldn’t be so great, and thus, the film would fail to be the absolute triumph that it is. “All of a Sudden” is a two-pronged attack on the head and the heart, rewarding viewers for their patience and attention by leaving them emotionally and intellectually affected in a way that will last long after the credits end. Memorably, one character remarks with unadorned profundity about the nursing home residents, “Until they die, they’re alive.” In the simple spirit of this sentiment, “All of a Sudden” is an honest, impassioned reminder that we mustn’t waste the one beautiful life into which we’ve been lucky to have been born.
