‘All of a Sudden’ Cannes Review: The Radical Act of Paying Attention

Finding the best way to deal with human suffering — with pain, illness, grief — seems to be the driving purpose of Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira), the chief physician of a Parisian nursing home who is attempting to introduce a new approach to patient care. Through this sensitive, intriguing, and well-intentioned three-hour-and-twenty-minute French film by Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi (Drive My Car), Marie-Lou and those around her — patients, staff, family members, and others who gradually join the circle — learn, painfully and hopefully in equal measure, the lesson in humanity the film sets out to teach.

All of a Sudden follows an unusual narrative path, though it unfolds largely within the walls of that clinic. Marie-Lou is struggling to put into practice a method known as Humanitude: a philosophy of care centered on treating patients as full human beings — making eye contact, speaking to them directly, asking questions even of those with severe cognitive impairments. The more experienced nurses resist it. They feel it costs too much time per patient and that, however admirable in theory, it simply doesn’t square with the demands of the real world.

The institution’s administrators seem to share that skepticism, but Marie-Lou and her enthusiastic team are convinced that the approach is not only kinder to patients but will ultimately reduce costs as overall health improves. Marie-Lou herself, however, doesn’t quite practice what she preaches: she lives for work, appears to have no personal life to speak of, and has agreed, as part of a pilot program, to move into an apartment inside the facility to be closer to her patients.

One day, on a train back to the clinic, she crosses paths with a young autistic man wandering lost through the streets. She gets off at the stop, manages to stop him, and helps reunite him with his family — his grandfather Goro (Kyozo Nagatsuka), a theater actor, and the playwright Mari (Tao Okamoto). Grateful for the rescue, they invite Marie-Lou to see their show, which also deals with mental health. After a post-performance Q&A — where we learn that Marie-Lou speaks quite good Japanese — the two women fall into a conversation that stretches through the entire night. It moves from the sweeping to the intimate: a lengthy, diagram-aided analysis of capitalism’s impending collapse gives way to something more personal and devastating — Mari has terminal cancer and, by all indications, only a few months left.

From there, All of a Sudden drifts to other destinations before returning, always, to the clinic, guided by Hamaguchi’s clear and steady conviction that empathy, attentiveness, and art — if they cannot cure — can at least improve the quality of whatever time remains. It is, in its way, a utopian proposition: that the only escape from the concentric circles of exploited time is love, care, and solidarity.

There is something inevitably naïve about all this, and it becomes most apparent in the film’s second half — after that long night of conversation — when the nursing home begins to resemble a kind of community that, in its practical workings, edges uncomfortably close to a hippie commune. Hamaguchi runs into trouble when he tries to translate the women’s personal experience into a series of scenes that feel lifted from a self-help book, tipping the film toward the sentimental and, occasionally, the banal.

The film is at its best in its first half: when Marie-Lou navigates the cultural friction of implementing Humanitude, when she attends Goro and Mari’s play, and above all during that long night of conversation between the two women, which could stand as a film in its own right. Efira — speaking a remarkably convincing Japanese she learned for a film that moves fluidly between both languages — and Okamoto generate an extraordinary chemistry, walking, eating, sitting, arguing, and starting all over again through a night that echoes, without the romantic undertow, Before Sunrise. It is a film within the film, staging the chemistry of a friendship forming in real time: something accidental that will become central to both their lives.

Their near-philosophical digressions on capitalism, labor, leisure, and corporate logic might seem like an indulgent detour in a film ostensibly about reforming palliative care for the elderly. But they’re not. That context is precisely what lifts All of a Sudden above the kind of feel-good cinema that offers eye contact and hand-holding as a cure-all.

My sense is that Hamaguchi is reaching for something further: naïve as it may be, what he’s proposing is a refusal of the logic that demands everything be useful, everything generate returns, everything be productive. Sometimes, surrendering to pure contemplation may be the most honest and direct way to tell the rawest strain of capitalism — the one that has perfected the art of monetizing every hour of your existence — exactly where to go.