Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto star in the filmmaker's first French-language work, set at a Paris nursing home where two strangers are fortified by their belief in human dignity.
Chief Film Critic
Ryusuke Hamaguchi has often shown a fascination for the exchange of ideas as a form of process, negotiation and exploration, whether it’s the theater workshops in Drive My Car or the volatile town meetings with developers in Evil Does Not Exist. Conversation is action. Staff meetings and training sessions are a big part of the Japanese auteur’s All of a Sudden (Soudain), set primarily in a Paris elder-care facility run by a woman whose progressive treatment approach clashes with the realities of chronic understaffing and bottom-line-driven management.
The movie’s underlying question is whether individual care and compassion can survive the demographic decline of late-stage capitalism. As the concentration of wealth accelerates, for-profit sectors are paying less, inevitably leading to lower birth rates and labor shortages in the healthcare services required to handle an aging population.
If that sounds a bit dry, well, it is, especially when presented as a casual conversation between friends, complete with diagrams, graphs and bullet points on a whiteboard. But Hamaguchi has his own docu-style methodology, and for audiences with the patience to get through a leisurely paced and very talky first hour, All of a Sudden evolves into a moving affirmation of the basic human rights of respect and dignity. Whether it justifies the three-and-a-quarter-hour running time will be up for debate. But either way, the payoff is worth it.
