Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden is a film that is in no hurry to reach anywhere and is illustrative of his signature style of slow cinema. With a long and languid runtime of 196 minutes, it is quite evidently a daunting watch. More so because nothing much happens in these three hours and 16 minutes. Just that some strangers bump into each other, talk, find a connection and face the vicissitudes of life, as anyone else does, dealing with the surprises and shocks that get thrown at them when they are least expecting. Yet All of a Sudden envelops the viewers in its gentle world, making them leave with a lingering sense of compassion for the individuals, relationships and the human condition that lie at its core.
Based on the book You and I – The Illness Suddenly Get Worse by Makiko Miyano and Maho Isono, the film has been co-written by Hamaguchi and Léa Le Dimna. The France-Japan-Germany-Belgium co-production is the Japanese entry for Best International Feature Film Oscar.
Hamaguchi makes us take a deep dive into the friendship that gets forged between two women—one of them, Marie-Lou Fontaine (Virginie Efira), the head of a caregiving facility in Paris and Mari Morisaki (Tao Okamoto), a terminally ill Japanese theatre director. Both bond over their brokenness and pain, the challenges and grief and in trying to understand each other, they are able to connect with themselves.
The narrative spans parallel worlds—Paris and Kyoto, a nursing home and the theatre. Just like Anton Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya within the narrative of his Oscar-winning Drive My Car, here Hamaguchi uses the device of a Japanese play, Mari’s Up Close, No One is Normal, underscoring yet again how human communication transcends the barriers of language and how art and life collide at times and coincide at others. But most so it’s about stressing on the radical reforms required in caregiving, which inspires Marie-Lou to double up her long-standing demand for introducing the humane care technique called Humanitude in her facility.
As he is wont to, Hamaguchi builds the narrative on long takes and never-ending conversations—on art and commerce, capitalism and socialism, history and culture and most so on the many contradictions inherent in being a caregiver and being cared for. Afterall, a patient and a caregiver relationship could swing between the harmonious and the hostile. The exchanges are not just about talking but listening, assimilating and transforming. In the process they reveal the many facets of the two characters and their strengths, vulnerabilities and insecurities, the ties that bind, the essential loneliness and alienation they feel amid company, the shared lust for life and the intense desire to live on their own terms.
Their inner quest is framed in tender, telling close-ups with the expansive landscape stretching behind. The miniscule humans framed against the vastness of the universe. Despite the seeming propriety and calm of people and places, there’s lots that’s simmering below the surface.
Shot in a nursing home with professional actors and the real residents seamlessly in tandem with each together, All of a Sudden is anchored in the emotionally limpid and immensely moving performances from Okamoto and Efira that got them joint Best Actress award at Cannes.
All of a Sudden is a profound and poignant reflection on what it means to live and die, on sentience and mortality, on caring and being cared for. It is as much about the finality of death as it is about the continuities and the essential circle of life. Afterall, there can be no defined sense of an ending when life is not just about arrivals and departures but also about being in transit.