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.