By Jason Osiason

All of a Sudden

There’s a stretch in All of a Sudden where two women spend practically an entire night talking, and I swear I started dreading the sunrise because I didn’t want the conversation to end. They’re strangers who suddenly aren’t, sharing things you wouldn’t tell people you’ve known for twenty years, and the intimacy of it is almost overwhelming. Completely platonic, too, which feels important because Ryusuke Hamaguchi understands that friendship can be every bit as consuming and life changing as falling in love, sometimes more so. Three hours and sixteen minutes of people talking, caring for one another and trying to figure out how to live when time is running out, and I would have happily sat through another hour. God, what a movie.

Virginie Efira plays Marie-Lou, the director of a nursing home outside Paris who’s fighting to introduce a more humane approach to caring for patients with dementia. She wants people spoken to, touched gently, looked in the eye and treated like they’re still in the room even when they can no longer tell you they are, which sounds perfectly reasonable until you meet the exhausted staff and administrators who have to make it work. Marie-Lou isn’t always particularly graceful about handling resistance either, and I loved that Hamaguchi allows her to be right about so much while occasionally being a complete pain in the ass. He spends a surprising amount of time on the actual mechanics of caregiving, the physical effort involved, how somebody is lifted or comforted, how much patience it takes to simply stand there and listen. Through a chance encounter with a young Japanese boy, she eventually meets Mari, played by Tao Okamoto, a theater director from Japan who has terminal cancer and absolutely no intention of spending whatever time she has left feeling sorry for herself. Marie-Lou attends one of her productions, they get talking afterward, and before long the film has quietly abandoned almost everything else to follow them.

I don’t think there’s another filmmaker alive who understands the sheer excitement of conversation quite like Hamaguchi. Mari and Marie-Lou wander through Paris discussing death, their work, the absurd institutions they’ve spent their lives navigating, and eventually end up at the nursing home still talking. There’s an extended sequence where Mari starts diagramming the failures of capitalism on a whiteboard, and I realize how ridiculous it sounds to single that out as one of the most exhilarating scenes I’ve seen this year, but I was absolutely glued to it. A WHITEBOARD. In the middle of a three hour movie! The pleasure comes from watching somebody think out loud with such enthusiasm that the person listening can barely keep up, and Efira’s reactions are wonderful because you can practically see Marie-Lou reconsidering her entire life while trying to follow along. Hamaguchi never feels the need to manufacture excitement around these exchanges, either. He just lets the women talk, sometimes for an absurdly long time, and somehow every additional minute makes you want another.

What really got me was how much of their friendship eventually becomes about touch, particularly the simple comfort of being physically close to somebody without any expectation of romance. A foot massage, a hand resting against another person’s body, the relief of having someone take care of you when you’ve spent most of your adult life doing it for everybody else. It’s such a lovely extension of everything Marie-Lou has been fighting for at the nursing home, only now she’s beginning to understand what receiving that tenderness feels like herself. And I appreciate that Hamaguchi never pretends any of this is going to solve the larger problems hanging over these women. Mari is still dying, the nursing home is still struggling, and all those conversations about the failures of capitalism aren’t going to magically fix the system. Their friendship doesn’t make any of that disappear, which is precisely why the time they spend together becomes so precious.

Efira is devastating here, playing Marie-Lou with a kind of accumulated exhaustion that I don’t think she fully recognizes in herself until Mari comes along. She’s spent so long explaining how other people deserve to be treated that she’s apparently forgotten she deserves some of the same consideration, and watching her gradually allow herself to become vulnerable is enormously moving. Okamoto is equally extraordinary, giving Mari this almost insatiable appetite for everything around her, intellectually restless, mischievous, occasionally exhausting and much funnier than you’d expect from a character facing terminal illness. I loved how easily she could dominate a conversation without ever making it feel like Marie-Lou was simply there to listen. They bring out things in each other that neither woman seems particularly comfortable acknowledging, and the performances become so intertwined that I can’t imagine the film working with either actress alone. Some of the best acting I’ve seen all year.

I keep trying to figure out how to recommend a 196-minute French-Japanese drama about a nursing home, terminal cancer and the failures of capitalism without making it sound like an assignment, because I promise you I haven’t felt this emotionally fulfilled by a movie in ages. It’s funny as hell in places, unexpectedly playful and so generous toward its characters that even the smallest interactions started getting to me. Drive My Car already convinced me Hamaguchi was a genius at finding entire lives inside ordinary conversations, but I think this might have affected me even more. I walked out wanting to call people I hadn’t spoken to in months, wanting to listen better when somebody was talking and generally feeling a little embarrassed by how much time I spend worrying about things that don’t matter. For a movie so preoccupied with dying, All of a Sudden made me ridiculously happy to be alive. One of the best films of the festival, without question. [A]