‘All of a Sudden’ Review: Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto Forge a Life-Changing Friendship in Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s Life-Giving Drama

Two women talk for the best part of three-and-a-quarter-hours and Ryusuke Hamaguchi makes of it an unassumingly momentous miracle. “All of a Sudden,” the Japanese director’s gorgeous new feature, is the rarest type of film, not merely good enough to remind you what cinema can be, but great enough to remind you what life can be. At times, suspended in the long silvery skeins of conversation that thread through the magnificent screenplay (by Hamaguchi and co-writer/translator Léa Le Dimna) it achieves a kind of levitating grace, before depositing you back down in your seat again, a slightly different, slightly mended version of the person you were before. 

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Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) is one half of the film’s radiant heart, though there is nothing half-hearted about her. The recently appointed director of a Parisian home for the elderly, she is a crusader for Humanitude, a pioneering approach to care work, which aims to restore to elderly patients the dignity that a chronically under-resourced healthcare system regards as a luxury. But the transition to its methods is not all smooth sailing. Head nurse Laurence (Marie Denarnaud) and popular recruit Djibril (Gabriel Dahmani) are on board, while brisk, well-respected senior nurse Sophie (Marie Bunel) sees it only as an inexcusably indulgent added burden on the overworked staff. Initially it seems like the film will be a forensic examination of the politics of this institution (it was shot in a working care facility), with the battle lines between idealism and pragmatism thus drawn. And it is, but it’s about to be so much more. 

On her commute home, a careworn Marie-Lou spots a young man joyfully running through a nearby park. Gladdened by the sight, she is also concerned that the boy, who clearly has a developmental disability, is apparently unaccompanied. She goes to find him, and seeing his GPS tracker, waits with him until his guardians arrive. He is Tomoki (a superbly sensitive performance by Kodai Kurasaki) and he has strayed from his grandfather Goro (Kyozo Nagatsuka), a theater actor out for a walk with his director, Mari (Tao Okamoto). Goro and Mari are relieved to find Tomoki, and thanking Marie-Lou, discover she has easy, conversational Japanese. (Efira learnt the language for this role, which is basically astounding given her fluency.) Mari invites her to their play. 

Marie-Lou is inspired and enlivened by the experimental show. She stays behind to talk with Mari afterwards, and there begins their extraordinary night of conversation. Code-switching seamlessly between occasional English, Japanese and French (Mari studied at the Sorbonne, and Okamoto is as impressive as Efira in her non-native tongue), their exchange takes them from the banks of the Seine, back to the staff room of the care home and into the next morning. And it encompasses a torrent of ideas, anecdotes and musings that both women had stored up as though in a lockbox, only to stumble upon a stranger with the key. 

For Mari, it comes just in time; she is in the latter stages of terminal cancer, which, rather than making their story a sentimental “Beaches”-style weepie, here simply adds a tug of emotive urgency to their experience of the present moment, letting the now of each of them become more important than their history or their future plans. Why else spend a long part of this precious night explaining, as Mari does to Marie-Lou with the aid of an honest-to-God whiteboard, your thoughts on capitalism and urbanism and resource scarcity?

It is difficult to divide any one thing from the other here, from those inextricably interlinked lead performances to Samuel Andreyev’s sparing score to Azusa Yamazaki’s liquid editing and the camerawork from DP Alain Guichaoa, that is unobtrusive yet makes intensely talky scenes feel roomy and cinematic. All the craft is in humble service of a screenplay uncommon for its faith in the power of language and communication to transform and to console.

Perhaps some will find this gentleness frustrating, and interpret it as an apologia for a complacency inappropriate to our angry, angular, activist times. But here, the acceptance of one’s limitations is less an admission of defeat than a reaffirmation of one’s power to effect change within them. It’s a shame that the English subtitle for the offhand comment “Je ne peux pas aller plus vite que la musique” is the helpless-sounding “There’s only so much I can do,” when it literally translates to I cannot go faster than the music. Why should you ever want to go faster than the music?

Speaking of going fast, this is a long film and it is not quite right to say it doesn’t feel long, although the clock-minutes fly by. Just as Mari and Marie-Lou’s actual time together is short but opens up new inner eternities for both, so is there some kind of temporal voodoo at work on the viewer. Because when an encounter — with a lover, a friend, a stranger or a new film by Ryusuke Hamaguchi — takes you to a place that transforms you, enlarges you and heals the hairline cracks where all the hope keeps leaking out, there is no such thing as too long spent there. In fact, the feeling it may leave you with is that which the women often express to each other when they say they don’t want this night or that day to end, and what they’re really saying is among the loveliest things that can be said: I want more time with you. 

This is the generosity of Hamaguchi’s storytelling. It is inspired by these two women (and before them, by a book of letters between philosopher Makiko Miyano and medical anthropologist Maho Isono) but not exclusive to them. When, sitting on a Kyoto hillside eating instant ramen, Mai and Marie-Lou agree that they like their noodles “al dente” you may have to stop yourself from murmuring, “So do I” — so much does it feel like you’re sitting on that log with them, drinking in the morning air, the mountain view and the monosodium glutamate.

And so what they learn from each other, we can learn for ourselves: to not let perfect become the enemy of good. To allow your anger at the cosmic unluckiness of a friend’s far-too-early passing be overwhelmed by your gratitude at the cosmic luckiness of ever having met them at all. To never let the unfairness of not having more — more power, more life, more time, more energy — blind you to the beauty of what you have. If you can’t live in a world you love, love the world you live in.