Ryusuke Hamaguchi watched with some caution as he received a standing ovation after the Cannes premiere of “All of a Sudden.” He says he’s not one to take praise at face value.
“I also know that standing ovations are kind of a tradition here,” he told Variety. “I don’t know how seriously to take it.” But then he looked. “I really felt that this movie was being embraced by people.” What solved it for him wasn’t the applause, but what he saw in the lead. Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto were both visibly moved. “They looked like they had just accomplished something really important,” he says. “I was so happy to be able to see their faces and be with them.”
Jessica Kiang reviewed the film in Variety magazine, writing, “The Japanese director’s gorgeous new work is the rarest kind of film, not just good enough to remind you what movies are about, but good enough to remind you what life is all about.”
At the end of the competition premiere, there was applause and many audience members were moved to tears. It was a welcome commensurate with the ambition of a project that took Hamaguchi five years to work out and required him to adapt the book in a country where he did not speak his own language, with actors acting in a language that was not their native tongue, and which, by his own account, contained no visual elements.
“Suddenly”, which is in contention for the Palme d’Or, is loosely based on an actual letter published as “You and I – The disease suddenly worsens” between the philosopher Makiko Miyano, who was dying of cancer, and the medical anthropologist Maho Isono. In the film, Efira plays the director of a Parisian nursing home and Okamoto plays a terminally ill Japanese theater director whose arrival there brings the two women to an increasingly close understanding of their mortality. The Japanese-French co-production is Hamaguchi’s first film set primarily outside of Japan, and his first in French.
The source material was more on his mind than the project itself. When developing The Wheel of Fate and Illusion, he had read The Problem of Chance by early 20th century Japanese philosopher Shuzo Kuki. It is a dense work, which he describes as “really difficult to understand.” Miyano, a philosopher whose research focuses on chance, writes about the same Kuki text in a letter. When Hamaguchi discovered that she had read this book, he immediately felt a kinship with her. “I felt a kind of kinship with what I was doing,” he says. But the connection that was ultimately forced upon him was physical rather than intellectual. “When I read those words, I was shaking,” he says. “We felt that if we could convey that emotion to the audience, we would actually be conveying something very important.”
It was an obvious problem that hindered his quick movement. That means there’s nothing to photograph. The characters are abstract, philosophical, emotional, and resolutely non-visual. Hamaguchi took time to conduct a long interview with Isono. He spoke with Miyano’s family and friends to understand what kind of person Miyano was. And he realized that none of that was what he wanted to make. “What moved me was the content of the book itself,” he says. He also had more practical concerns. He explains that fictionalizing real people inevitably simplifies them. “We didn’t want the audience’s curiosity to seep into the private lives of Isono or the Miyano family.” A pure leap into fiction was the only option. He didn’t know what form that would take.
The answer came about two years later, when French production company CineFrance approached him about filming in France. “Something just clicked,” he says. He thought about Eric Rohmer, especially “My Night at Maude,” and the desire of French audiences for philosophical conversation as entertainment. “I felt that even though the dialogue was very abstract, it could work as a movie,” he says. He took the project to Japanese producer Hiroko Matsuda and asked for a partnership with CineFrance, which led to a co-production.
With the framework for Japan and France in place, he needed to build a structural bridge between the two countries. He found it in Humanitude, a philosophy of care developed in France about 40 years ago and introduced to Japan about 10 years ago. This philosophy was built on the principle of treating patients, especially those with dementia, as complete human beings. “This is not just a method of dementia care,” Hamaguchi says. “I felt that there were hints in this book about how to treat other people as human beings, and I felt that it connected to my own work.” The film is partially set in a Humanitude facility, and this methodology gives the relationship between Ephyra and Okamoto’s characters both its opportunity and its ethical basis.
The subsequent casting decisions were some of the boldest in the film. Efira and Okamoto spent part of the film speaking the language of their female partners, not fluently but understandably enough to act. Hamaguchi built a long preparation period around repeatedly reading the bilingual script in Japanese and French so that the weight of the words and their emotions were ingrained in each actor’s body before production began. “They had to really look at each other and really listen,” he says. “You think about not just the meaning of the words, but what was going on with the other person’s body.” He argues that the multilingual setting not only enabled, but required, a particular kind of attentiveness. “It brought more attention to me. I felt like the situation naturally allowed for that.” He paused. “Honestly, working with them made me realize once again how amazing actors are.”
The French stage culture was something Hamaguchi had never encountered in Japan. At home, he explains, tight budgets and schedules have created a filmmaking environment organized around contingencies: Plan A, Plan B, and Plan C, each of which requires preparation and can be an arduous task in itself. In France he found the opposite direction. “We had the freedom to do what we thought was right in the moment, and that was shared by the entire crew,” he says. “That doesn’t usually happen in Japan.” He arrived with the preparation habits of a Japanese film director, and found this combination suited the material. “I’ve done a lot of preparation for a place that also allows freedom,” he says. “I think the results were really good.”
His next idea is intentionally small in scale. After a production that required years of preparation and cross-continental filming, he wants to return to something compact, a short film in the spirit of The Wheel of Fate and Fantasy, which was itself a trilogy. “Every time you get something through filmmaking, you have to look at what was working on a smaller scale,” he says. “A little experiment.” He doesn’t know yet what it will entail.
All of a Sudden will be released in Japan on June 19th and in France on August 12th. North American rights are held by Neon.
