Ryusuke Hamaguchi¡¯s first French-language film, ¡°All of a Sudden,¡± is about caring for others, creating emotional bonds and what it means to truly see another person.
The immediacy implied in the film¡¯s title is quietly ironic, given that it unfolds over three hours and 16 minutes, its dramatic weight accruing through long conversations, unhurried silences and the rhythms of daily life inside a Parisian care facility.
The story follows Marie-Lou Fontaine (Virginie Efira), the director of a care center on the outskirts of Paris who is waging a battle to introduce Humanitude, a French philosophy of caregiving that treats elderly residents with dementia as full human beings. When a chance encounter brings her into the orbit of Mari Morisaki (Tao Okamoto), a Japanese theater director with Stage 4 cancer who is in Paris for a production, the two women are drawn together by the same stubborn conviction that persevering in one¡¯s beliefs can create real change.
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