In Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s All of a Sudden, a harried, in some ways embattled director of a nursing home in the Parisian suburbs named Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) has been attempting to institute a humane care technique known as Humanitude, in spite of bureaucratic resistance and general nursing-staff recalcitrance.

But then she happens to engage one evening with Mari Morisaki (Tao Okamoto), a terminally ill Japanese playwright-director, and boy, do they strike up a long conversation about end-of-life care and facing death! They talk and share for hours on end, not just into the night but into the pre-dawn hours and beyond.

And then they fly to Kyoto together and talk a lot more as well as explore the joyful art of foot massage (no lezzy stuff — just feet), and then they fly back to Paris for more talk and caring and well-massaged peds all around. And then (non-spoiler!) Okamoto’s character finally, inevitably gives up the ghost.

And there’s a Big Lebowski-like scene in which two of Morisaki’s nearest and dearest (a 70ish stage actor, played by Kyōzō Nagatsuka, and a developmentally disabled teenaged kid who constantly yelps like a hyena) sprinkle her ashes from a pretty Kyoto mountaintop. Do they suffer the indignity of ashes flying into their faces a la Jeff Bridges‘ Jeff Lebowski? Of course not — this isn’t that kind of film.

For what it’s worth, I didn’t suffer all that much through All of a Sudden. Well, I did to a certain extent (as did several viewers who bailed out of Friday afternoon’s press screening inside the Salle Bazin), but I was so impressed — amazed, really — at Hamaguchi’s audacity.

His bold-as-brass decision, I mean, to make a 196-minute film that is basically a slow-moving, didactic conversational instructional — a 21st Century counterpart to Jean-Luc Godard‘s Marxist instructional films (1967 to 1974) — that completely ignores pretty much all of the dramatic basics — no plot, no character arcs, no story tension, no second-act pivots, no third-act payoffs or dramatic surprises — but at the same time heavily invests in creating spiritual flotation vibes that are kind of catching and make you feel…well, settled and serene.

When my life eventually comes to an end, I would like this transitional passage to occur within a Marie-Lou-styled environment…seriously. I would probably decline offers of foot-and-toe massages but otherwise, cool. Let no one claim that All of a Sudden isn’t a nicely persuasive bit of pro-Humanitude propaganda.

Everyone gets and gives foot massages in this thing, and you can bet I was saying to myself “thank God Hamaguchi insisted on everyone receiving perfect pedicures before the cameras rolled….thank God Almighty for that.”

For what it’s worth sitting through Mascha Schilinski’s Sound of Falling last year was a much more uncomfortable experience.

(1) Fatherland director/cowriter Pawel Pawlikowski, star Sandra Huller during Friday’s 11 am press conference; (2) Parallel Lives costars Virginie Efira (who seemed slightly more slender today than in Asghar Farhadi‘s just-premiered film) and Vincent Cassel; (3) Croisette-facing sculpture by Bruno Catalano.

As expected, Pawel Pawlikowski‘s Fatherland, which I caught late yesterday afternoon, is an austere masterwork. Damn near perfect in every respect, it immediately struck me as a Palme d’Or winner waiting to happen. Spare and precise and honed to the bone, Fatherland runs only 82 minutes…a thrilling discipline!

The performances are equally spare, if not more so. Sandra Huller is being touted (and will continue to be touted) as a Best Actress Oscar contender, but she plays it very close to the vest, as in “very“. The German actress has two scenes in which she lets loose with emotional frustration and unleashed grief over the shocking suicide of her brother Klaus (August Diehl), but that’s it. The rest of her performance is subdued to the max, and yet the reality of her core situation sinks right in. Full exposure.

A 1949 road movie about the great Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler) and his daughter Erika (Huller) travelling through a divided Germany for a Goethe celebration in the city of Weimar, Fatherland is about as narratively fat-free as a smarthouse feature (or even a popcorn flick) could possibly be.

Translation: Everything that needs to be said or understood is fully conveyed by Fatherland, although some of the HE rubes will probably complain “there’s not enough meat on the bone!” To which I say “there’s enough meat here, trust me…quality, not quantity…nutrition, nutrition.”

It was principally shot, of course, by Pawlikowski’s longtime collaborator Lukasz Zal with the usual needle-sharp monochrome palette — deep blacks, lush grays, ravishing silvertones — within a boxy 1.37:1 aspect ratio.

Fatherland is immaculate and exquisite, and is particularly admirable for the subtlety deployed at every turn. Plot advancements and historical underpinnings are never hammered home — it’s all played deftly and solemnly…fine period detail, a fascinating “you’re really there” aesthetic.

One of my favorite scenes is nominally of little consequence, and yet feels like a perfect brushstroke. Thomas and Erika are stopped — idling — at an East German border crossing. A young soldier, presumably unaware of the elder Mann’s status, taps on a rear passenger window and asks, by way of a slight gesture, if Thomas could spare a cigarette. The author rolls down the window and offers the lad one of his smallish cigars. Not a word, not a wink…a slight hint of disdain.

I’m sorry but I liked Fatherland so much that I’m leaving now to catch it a second time at an 8:30 am Grand Lumiere screening.

HE to critic friend after 6:45 pm screening of Asghar Farhadi’s Parallel Tales: “So whadja think?”

Critic friend to HE: (Making thumbs-down gesture) “Boring. Totally bored. Too long.”

HE: “But it’s a really honest examination of what writers do, I thought…an exercise in naked self-portraiture. An admission that writers do whatever the fuck they can — imagine anything, steal ideas, stalk women, use others, play dishonest emotional games — in order to create a good story or write a good screenplay. Farhadi is admitting ‘this is who I am, what I am.’ And in this sense, it’s really bold.”

Critic friend: “It’s boring. All apartment interiors, two or three cafe scenes, two Paris Metro scenes…all talk. I kept wanting it to end, and time and again it refused to.”

HE: “I realize it’s visually self-limiting because it’s almost all dialogue, but I wasn’t bored at all. I was totally hooked because it’s kind of Rear Window-ish, and because it keeps you guessing as to where the narrative is going.”

Critic: “Great. Good for you.”

HE: “Too much dialogue? What were you looking for, a car chase or something?”

Critic: “I’m just tired of films that are basically just MCUs of people talking and talking. Cinema is changing. I want more than just dialogue.”

HE: “You’re tired of dialogue? God, you sound like a video game guy!”

Critic: “I was bored…sorry. I wanted more.”

I’m almost all alone on this one. Almost everyone I’ve read or spoken to disagrees. The dismissal of this obviously different, indisputedly ambitious, unusually told tale of serpentine plot threads, switching narratives, covert agendas and discreet fake-outs is unmistakable.

When the credits began rolling at the end of Thursday night’s Salle Debussy screening, faint clapping could be heard but the sound of ominous silence easily dominated.

I’m not saying the naysayers are wrong, but they seem to be ignoring the self-portraiture aspect. Farhadi cast Adam Bessa, a 34-year-old French-Tunisian actor who bears a certain resemblance to Farhadi, as Adam, the film’s central protagonist / instigator. It’s not a stretch to regard Bessa as some kind of Farhadi stand-in.

I’ll try to fill in some of the blanks tomorrow, but it’s 12:30 am and I have to attend an 8:30 am screening, not to mention be up and sharp by 6:50 am.

There can be no disagreement that the 49 year-old Virginie Efira is, right now, easily the most fetching, Marilyn Monroe in Some Like It Hot-level, middle-aged actress on the planet earth. Zaftig is beautiful.

It’s a bit disconcerting that costar Vincent Cassel, who will turn 60 this year, is presented by Farhadi as a withered, getting-older guy with aching limbs and thinning hair. In David Cronenberg‘s The Shrouds (’24) he played a hardbod cool cat with a perfect bop haircut. I know it sounds childish to say “I prefer the latter”, but I do.

John LeCarre‘s candid, artfully worded critique of Martin Ritt‘s 1965 adaptation happens during the last five or six minutes….brilliantly observed.

Last night’s Salle Debussy screening of Juan Cabral and Santiago Franco‘s The Match, a highly intelligent, perfectly edited and fully rousing recollection of the 1986 FIFA World Cup match between Argentina and England, was rapturously received, to put it mildly.

I am not a sports hound, of course, and have never, ever watched a soccer game anywhere (pro or amateur), and I adored the second half of this film. (The first half is fine.) I felt truly charged and elated by the wondrous athleticism of the late Diego Maradona…26 when the game was played, 60 when he passed in 2020.

Cabral and Franco cover all the engaging angles and side-stories, step by step including the whole Falklands War backdrop…all of it. Extra-special praise for the editing team of Lucas Coppolechia, Sebastian Fasanelli, Juan Pablo Scaglione and Mauro Caporossi.

I’ve no explanation for having mis-spelled the word “standing.”

Just for openers, the combination of Lupita Nyong’o as Helen of Troy plus Elliot Page…yeesh.

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Zoe Kazan‘s longform Netflix version of John Steinbeck‘s East of Eden will be strikingly different from her grandfather’s 1955 version, which was basically about James Dean‘s anguished Cal Trask.

Zoe’s version adopts the point of view of Jo Van Fleet‘s Cathy Ames/Kate Trask, the bitter, hard-edged madam character who shot Raymond Massey in the shoulder and then, many years later, lent Dean $5K so he could partner with Albert Dekker“s Will Hamilton in the bean business.

I’m simply too attached to Elia Kazan’s 1955 version to give his granddaughter’s angry-feminist version a fair shake.

I respect the fact that Florence Pugh has apparently slimmed down and is no longer chubby-cheeked.

I don’t know about Jane Schoenbrun‘s Teenage Sex and Death at Camp Miasma (Thursday at 8:30 am) or the 1 pm follow-up, Diego Luna‘s Ashes (Niza en la Boca), although reviews of the Luna have been pretty good so far.

But I’m fairly certain that Pawel Pawlikowsky‘s Fatherland (4:45 pm) will be some kind of monochrome smarthouse knockout**, and that Asghar Farhadi‘s Parallel Tales (6:45 pm) will, at the very least, register as moderately impressive.

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** Sandra Huller‘s performance as Erika Mann, daughter of novelist Thomas Mann (Hanns Zischler), is already being touted as a Best Actress contender. How do I know this? Because Huller will soon be interviewed by THR‘s Scott Feinberg at the Campari Lounge, which is located in “the bunker.”