All of a Sudden wins Efira and Okamoto a shared Cannes prize before its Japanese release

The first thing the film hands you is light. Hamaguchi opens on the flat, forgiving daylight of a care home on the western edge of Paris, where the corridors keep a faint green borrowed from the garden past the glass and the residents’ faces are lit like portraits in a hall that has run out of wall. The place is called the Garden of Freedom, and the woman who runs it, Marie-Lou Fontaine, has organised her whole working life around one stubborn conviction: that the people in her wards should be met as people, not processed as cases. The building is shabby and underfunded, the staff stretched thin, and the camera regards all of it, the trolleys and the day room and the strip of lawn, with the same even, unhurried attention.

Into that carefully kept room comes Mari Morisaki, a Japanese theatre director living with advanced cancer, whose given name rhymes with her host’s by something close to accident. Working in French for the first time, Hamaguchi lets that small coincidence carry the architecture of the film. He builds it as a duet of two women, two languages and one nearly shared name, and trusts the symmetry to hold more than three hours of close, patient attention without tipping into either tract or weepie.

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The casting reads as a thesis about what the film wants to be. Virginie Efira plays Marie-Lou as warmth under pressure, a manager whose competence is its own form of tenderness and whose exhaustion never quite reaches the residents. Tao Okamoto gives Mari a brittle, watchful stillness that keeps a dying woman from hardening into a lesson; she observes her own decline the way a director watches a rehearsal, noting what works and what does not. The two performances are built to lean on one another, and the jury at this year’s Cannes acknowledged as much by refusing to separate them: Efira and Okamoto shared the festival’s Best Actress prize, and Okamoto became the first Japanese actress to win it.

Hamaguchi and his cinematographer shoot the home and the city around it without flourish, letting rooms fill with daylight and conversation rather than incident. Paris here is not the postcard but the periphery, the bus routes and the tired garden and the kitchens working at the wrong hour, and the film keeps returning to faces held a beat longer than comfort allows. The visual argument is one of attention: that looking at someone steadily, for a long time, is itself a form of care the institution can rarely afford to give.

The method is recognisably his. Across his chamber dramas Hamaguchi has turned long takes and plain rooms into pressure systems, where a single conversation can quietly reorganise everything that follows it. Moving into French, and into a story that travels between Tokyo and the suburbs of Paris, is a genuine departure, but the instincts are intact: the patience, the trust in talk, the sense of a camera that listens rather than illustrates.

The premise is borrowed from life. The film is loosely based on a published correspondence between the philosopher Makiko Miyano, who was living with terminal illness, and the anthropologist Maho Isono, letters that tried to think clearly about what a body does when it suddenly worsens and what care actually demands of the people who give it. Hamaguchi and his co-writer Léa Le Dimna keep the book’s central question more than its particulars: how two strangers assemble a shared language for an ending that neither of them controls.

None of this guarantees the film earns its length. A drama of more than three hours about a caregiver and a dying woman runs a steady risk of sentimentality, and the rhyming-names device can read as contrivance as easily as grace. The cross-cultural framing, a French institution and a Japanese guest, invites a tidiness the material ought to resist, and a shared acting prize can obscure how differently the two leads are actually working. The film makes no promise to resolve grief, and viewers who want a clear arc toward consolation may find its refusal frustrating rather than bracing.

Around its leads, the cast includes Kyōzō Nagatsuka as Gorô Kiyomiya, Kodai Kurosaki as Tomoki Kubodera, Jean-Charles Clichet as Olivier and Marie Bunel as Sophie. Hamaguchi wrote the screenplay with Léa Le Dimna. A France-Japan-Germany-Belgium co-production, the film was assembled by Cinefrance Studios, Office Shirous, Bitters End, Heimatfilm and Tarantula; Diaphana Distribution handles France, Bitters End releases it in Japan, and Neon holds the North American rights.

“All of a Sudden” premiered in competition at Cannes, where Hamaguchi also drew a Palme d’Or nomination. It opens in Japanese cinemas on June 19 and reaches French screens on August 12, running 196 minutes. North American and other international release dates have not yet been confirmed.

Tags: drama, All of a Sudden, Ryusuke Hamaguchi, Tao Okamoto, Virginie Efira

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