Ryusuke Hamaguchi"s ALL OF A SUDDEN confuses me. It confuses me because the film is not so much a drama or narrative as it is a polemic and a position paper on the correct way to treat people with dementia and cognitive decline. It is wildly over long. While it is a good film, I am confused by the outpouring of love the film has in some corners.
The film follows Marie-Lou, a woman who is trying to reshape the adult care facility she works at into a more humane place. There is a push back from some staff who feel her way will take up too much of their time and cause the patients to be in danger. She argues that in the short term it may, but in the long term they will have better results. Marie-Lou meets Mari , a Japanese theater director and they strike up a friendship.
Based on a series of letters between a philosopher and a medical anthropologist the film is structured around several long conversations between the two women. It's a series of discussions about life and how we view it, as well as how we should treat people with cognitive decline. While the performances of Virginie Efira as Marie-Lou and Tao Okamoto as Mari make the friendship real, you believe that they would suddenly fall into a deep friendship, the issue is that since almost all of the discussions are focused on ideas. The discussions so front and center the characters leave food and drink scattered across Paris and Kyoto as they stop talking to speak of important things. While the characters are there because the ladies are so good, the truth is focus of the film seems to be more about the ideas than then the people. They both frequently say, "I don't really know you" and they don't and neither do we. We only know the leads minimally. While this is frequently what happens when we meet someone new. the concentration on the pure discussion of ideas leaves very little room for human drama except in the fringes. Most of the truly fully formed characters are the people around the leads. Frankly, even though it's based on one of the writers of the source letters, the fact that Mari is dying, the title being a reference to her being fine until all of a sudden, her march to the grave would happen, seems like a constructed effort to bring humanity into a film that is lost in ideas. What annoyed me is that for the most part of the film there is no real moment where they shoot the breeze and open up for minute. Almost anything we learn leans into one of their ideas and another teaching moment from the director.
The discussions are interesting to a point (even if they are repetitive) but the film lost me during the first long discussion between the women occurred, not because it was hard to follow or that there was anything wrong with it, but more that the discussion about Capitalism and its problems comes from outside and has almost no real bearing on the rest of the film. It comes out of left field as if the filmmakers felt they had to make that point at that moment. Where it comes from and why it's there was lost on me. Additionally, the fact that the film is constantly presenting the same arguments over and over again weakens the film. The film works best, as in the later half when we see how the techniques are actually making a difference. (There should have been more of this)
Don't get me wrong, the film isn't bad, with the cast gloriously selling what we are seeing, it had to be good. However, at the same time the film feels like an over long lecture rather than a drama. I feel that a restructured film that lost about an hour would have a greater impact and feel like a polemic.
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