Gaze. Touch. Communication. Verticality. These are the pillars of a program called “Humanitude” that Marie-Lou Fontaine (Virginie Efira), the director of the Garden of Freedom elderly care facility in Paris, is attempting to train her care staff to utilize in their work with residents. The program is built on the idea that care for inpatient residents of advanced age with declining physical and cognitive abilities should be humane, personalized, and attentive. It’s also the guiding principle of Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, which marks the Japanese auteur’s first return to the Cannes Film Festival since Drive My Car won Best Screenplay in 2021.
In the meantime, he also delivered Evil Does Not Exist (2023), which premiered at Venice, adding to an increasingly revered artistic legacy that further extends his body of work, which is increasingly concerned with how people connect, care for one another, and move through systems larger than themselves.
The practice of care is intrinsic to All of a Sudden. The film primarily takes place within the grounds of Marie-Lou’s care facility during an administrative transition, where she is oftentimes working 24-hour days, covering night shifts, or spending extensive time and attention with residents and staff. Even away from work, her sense of responsibility never leaves her mind.
She is in the midst of scheduling expensive, labor-intensive training for her entire staff on both the theories and the work behaviors that comprise the program. The training often leaves the care team understaffed, and the luxurious cost is an imposition on the administrative board’s perspective of the facility’s budget, as the program threatens efficiency and profit margins. After all, these facilities are still businesses where time is treated as money.
Head nurse Sophie (Marie Bunel) is the primary opposition, noting the unnecessary burdens and indulgent resources dedicated to each patient. She argues that the level of care Marie-Lou expects is unrealistic for an already exhausted workforce. Tensions emerge between the hierarchy of nurses and caregivers, the varying points of view on the feasibility of implementing Humanitude, and the fledgling initiative for staff to live in available apartments on site to help in case of emergencies (work-life balance be damned). What begins as a workplace conflict gradually expands into a larger critique of the economic systems surrounding care itself, and it’s only the beginning of the conversation Hamaguchi intends to engage in.
It’s important to note that Hamaguchi co-wrote the film with Léa Le Dimna based on the published writings “You and I: The Illness Suddenly Get Worse” by Makiko Miyano and Maho Isono. In the letters, the pair, a philosopher and medical professional, exchange notes about life, love, and mortality. It’s the blueprint for the core ideas about care, human dignity, and mutual curiosity that are embedded in the film once the “philosopher” of the adaptation enters the story and joins Marie-Lou.
In a rare moment of work reprieve, Marie-Lou encounters a young boy, Tomoki (Kodai Kurasaki), erratically running alongside her train. With the clarity of someone who cares for disoriented patients for a living, she approaches him, discovers a GPS tracker in his discarded jacket, and decides to accompany him until his guardians can locate him. He turns out to be the grandson of a Japanese actor starring in a local play in Paris, alongside the play’s director (the aforementioned “philosopher”), acclaimed international stage director Mari Morisaki (Tao Okamoto). Marie-Lou’s kindness (and uncanny ability to speak fluent Japanese) is immediately rewarded with an invitation to their next production, and a budding friendship begins to flourish. This chance encounter is what All of a Sudden thrives on: seemingly ordinary gestures of humanity constructed with cosmically satisfying precision.
The majority of the film plays out as a platonic walk-and-talk that takes Mari and Marie-Lou around Paris, across borders to Kyoto, onto the grounds of Garden of Freedom, into resident homes, and, most of all, deep inside each other’s hearts and minds. Their time together is fleeting, but the constant verbal pleas for the night not to end make clear the unexplainable connection they share.
One of the many things that makes Hamaguchi special as a writer-director is that, regardless of the topic on screen, the writing becomes a sensitive, immersive experience as if to gently invite you into their world with open arms. The dialogue between Marie-Lou and Mari ranges from standards for resident care plans to intimate conversations about past relationships to elaborate debriefings on the self-destructive nature of capitalism.
In the lattermost exchange, Hamaguchi’s broader intentions are revealed. At this point, he has established the economy of the Garden of Freedom as a business institution with complex politics and levels of bureaucracy. But Mari’s demonstration contextualizes this within a broader claim about capitalism as a system built for the here and now, continuously extracting from the “outside” which consists of our time, our bodies, the countryside, and nature at large.
In a vacuum, it’s a clear and transparent evaluation of the developed world, exhibiting how cities suck the resources of the planet to accelerate the means of production, and in turn, accelerate the time we contribute to keeping the machine chugging along. In context, it scrutinizes Humanitude (and its fearless leader, Marie-Lou) as a democratic ideal tied to the cycles of this very system: consume all free time at the lowest possible financially viable wage to support the here and now (the residents of the facility). The film asks whether truly humane care can survive inside structures built around productivity and profit.
As an audience member, the implications are even bigger. Humanitude may be Marie-Lou’s agenda for Garden of Freedom, but it’s clear that Hamaguchi himself has crafted this film with the same principles in mind. He has tailored the film to the humane, personalized, and attentive requirements of his audience. His craft guides us toward the tools we need to see one another, to express mutual curiosity, to notice what’s happening around us, and to question the systems we accept. The editing is smooth as silk as if each cut is guided by divine touch, and every second of its runtime is earned by way of immersive compassion and connection.
In one conversation, Mari and Marie-Lou remark that life is so fragile, it can end all of a sudden. Hamaguchi knows this, and so too do his characters. They are acutely aware of their mortality and the role capitalism has played in shaping their lives, for better and worse. But Hamaguchi also suggests with the gentle, graceful touch of his words that individual life may not be the only thing defined by fragility. Armed with a collective sense of care and curiosity, and the willingness to lead with empathy, maybe, we too can break something fragile. We can break the cycles of capitalism we have learned to accept. Maybe too, even while hurtling us toward self-destruction, the systems of our world can change, all of a sudden.
Review Courtesy of Danny Jarabek
Feature Image Credit to NEON via Cannes Film Festival