In an age when “we just need to listen to each other more” has become a flaccid platitude that one says while standing staunchly in one’s political corner, Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s latest masterpiece, All of a Sudden, challenges audiences to really reflect on what true listening and understanding each other really looks like. His central characters not only form a tight bond over days of conversation but also communicate in languages foreign to them.
Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira), the newly appointed director at a Parisian elderly-care facility, is fluent in French and Japanese, the latter of which she learned while studying anthropology at Waseda University in Japan. Whereas Mari (Tao Okamoto) is a theatre director whose native tongue is Japanese but who learned French while studying philosophy at the Sorbonne in France. Considering they share similar-sounding names and mirror each other’s educational language experiences, one can attribute it to fate that their lives would intersect by chance one afternoon.
Taking up Mari on an invitation to see her play “Up Close, No One is Normal,” a one-man show performed by Goro (Kyozo Nagatsuka), and inspired by psychiatrist Franco Basaglia who pushed for a more communal approach to mental care in Italy, Marie-Lou is moved by how much the production puts her current struggles at work into perspective. Trying to institute the Humanitude approach to care, one that promotes meeting the patient at their level rather than forcing them into standardized checkboxes, Marie-Lou is receiving great pushback from some of the nurses who rebuke the training required and upper management who are more concerned with turning a profit.
Touched by Marie-Lou’s response to the play, and the general sense of curiosity and compassion for others that she displays, Mari reveals that she is going through some heavy stuff of her own. Diagnosed with terminal cancer, and sharing the news to someone outside of Goro for the first time, the director attempts to keep a positive outlook on life while wrestling with the knowledge that it could all be gone at any moment.
As the two women engage in long chats while spending time together, both on the streets and at each other’s workplaces, Hamaguchi ensures the audience feels the unyielding ropes of friendship pulling the central characters closer with each passing minute. In the filmmaker’s hands, conversation is not only the glue that unites his protagonists, but it also helps them and the audience sort through ideas and individuals whose views may be different from their own.
In one riveting sequence, Mari uses a whiteboard and dry-erase marker to break down her questions about the interconnectivity of democracy, capitalism, and nature. Presenting it as a self-eating pyramid, where one is reliant on the other, and nature is ultimately destroyed in the process, Mari makes a convincing argument as to why more money would not fix the problems the Humanitude project faces. Later in the film, an awkward public Q&A session with a frequently confrontational nurse and Marie-Lou reveals truths that can only come from lived experiences that are rarely considered.
Understanding that one cannot simply take a flamethrower to a forest and then start planting anew, All of a Sudden effectively conveys that change within systems can occur only through meaningful connection.
As with Hamaguchi’s brilliant film Drive My Car, the director also reiterates the power of art to help us move through difficult times in ways that are both mesmerizing and moving. Although the use of Mari’s play in the latter act is something that the viewer can see coming from a mile away, it does little to take away from the sheer depth of emotion that radiates from the screen.
Anchored by the sensational and sensitive performances of Efira and Okamoto, with Nagatsuka quietly stealing his few scenes, Hamaguchi manages to spin discourse about philosophy, anthropology, capitalism, health and more into a vibrant vision of what true care for the elderly should look like. All of a Sudden is the kind of film whose emotional beats never feel false, while reminding the viewer how fleeting life can be.
An exceptional piece of cinema and one of the year’s best films, All of a Sudden takes a compassionate look into what it means to truly treat each other like human beings.
