When we talk about “set pieces” in relationship to cinema, we often think of a jaw-dropping, computer-assisted visual sugar rush that is primed to leave the audience banjaxed with a sense of breathless awe. In Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s tremendously beautiful and wise new film, All of a Sudden, there is one such set-piece, and it involves a character, Tao Okamoto’s experimental theatre director Mari, using a whiteboard and two colour markers to meticulously illustrate the self-destructive folly of capitalism to another character, a progressive care home director named Maire-Lou played by Virginie Efira.
Through the immaculately chosen words and delicate actions delivered by his actors, Hamaguchi dismantles and reassembles the world before our eyes, a gasp-inducing spectacle of scholarly procedure that dares to look its audience in the eye with a guiding, inclusive smile.
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This French language, Paris-set feature, co-written with Léa Le Dimna, is inspired by the non-fiction work, ‘You and I – The Illness Suddenly Get Worse’ by Makiko Miyano and Maho Isono. The story is set mostly at The Garden of Freedom, a Parisian care-home for Alzheimer’s sufferers that specialises in a new caregiving technique with the slightly corny soubriquet of Humanitude. This special cognitive practice comes at the behest of Marie-Lou, a combined result of her academic studies in anthropology, and the experience of her mother’s swift decline as part of a system where patients were treated as little more than columns on a spreadsheet.
Marie-Lou’s natural care-giving instincts and a little bit of magical happenstance lead her into the wondrous sphere of Mari, who has mounted a play on the subject the traditional psychiatric wars and, as the pair’s bond quickly evolves, the latter reveals that she has stage-four cancer and that time is not on her side. And yet Marie-Lou is energised and educated by Mari’s unlikely effervescence at this doomy precipice in her life, and the film is essentially a chronicle of the pair’s time together, which includes a darting trip to the Kyoto countryside for al fresco Cup Noodles and an extended stay at The Garden of Freedom, where both women’s professional disciplines find a happy place to merge.
While the spectre of Mari’s death hovers over All of a Sudden, the title even referencing the nature of her decline, it’s an overwhelmingly affirmative and philosophical film in which a pair of hyper-articulate characters attempt to use language to unpick the mysteries of the human comedy. There are multiple theatrical performances which nest neatly within the drama, and there are numerous Q&A sessions – a Hamaguchi kink – in which the unique dynamic of responding to intimate questions in public allows for the most unguarded and poetic answers. Efira and Okamoto hopscotch effortlessly between French and Japanese, a suggestion that they are able to communicate with one another on a level more profound than normal. And Hamaguchi, as he did in films such as Drive My Car and Happy Hour, makes sure that the supporting characters are given colour, backstory and a soul.
Initially we discover that there is some pushback against the Humanitude system, mainly from career nurses who feel that their professional stature is being eroded by this suggested breakdown (and eventual destruction) of the space between patient and caregiver. Yet part of film’s function is to make a case for Humanitude, not merely as a form of care, but as a way to tell stories, to meet people, to forge a connection, to find a sliver of happiness in this dark, dark world. That, sometimes, making the effort to understand someone – to meet someone at the own level – can be as valuable as actually understanding them.