Hamaguchi Ryusuke watched the standing ovation after the Cannes premiere of “All of a Sudden” with a degree of caution. He is not, he says, someone who takes ovations entirely at face value.
“I also know that a standing ovation is kind of a tradition here,” he tells Variety. “I don’t know how seriously I’m supposed to take it.” But then he looked at the faces. “I felt very much that the film was being accepted by the people.” What settled it for him wasn’t the applause but what he saw in his leads: Virginie Efira and Okamoto Tao, both of them visibly moved. “They looked like they had just accomplished something really important,” he says. “To be able to see their expressions and to be with them gave me a lot of happiness.”
Reviewing the film for Variety, Jessica Kiang wrote: “The Japanese director’s gorgeous new feature is the rarest type of film, not merely good enough to remind you what cinema can be, but great enough to remind you what life can be.”
The ovation came at the end of a competition premiere that moved many in the audience to tears. It was a reception proportional to the ambition of the project, which took Hamaguchi five years to crack and required him to work in a country whose language he doesn’t speak, with actors performing in languages not their own, adapting a book that – by his own account – contained not a single visual element.
