Tao Okamoto and Virginie Efira in 'All of a Sudden'

Courtesy of Neon

When Tao Okamoto first read the script for Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s All of a Sudden, one scene told her above all others that this was hers for the taking. The sequence saw her character, a well-regarded playwright named Mari, explaining the systemic failures of modern capitalism. The monologue is long and complex, propelled by interconnecting arguments that, on the surface, might resemble an academic paper; it’s complete with her drawing whiteboard graphics to illustrate and summarize her points.

“This is something that I’d been thinking about over the years — and I got to lecture people on it in the movie, it’s amazing,” Okamoto says. “I think it will help a lot of people to connect the dots. I don’t think I’ve ever seen any movie explain and verbalize the system of capitalism and where we are like this.”

Related Stories

Izuka Hoyle-Led 'Prisoner' Renewed for Season 2 at Sky (Exclusive)

Lies, Betrayal and Hong Kong's Elite Take Center Stage in First Trailer For 'The Season' (Exclusive)

Of course, All of a Sudden is not an academic paper. Hamaguchi’s film feels about as far from that as you can get, in fact, playing as a richly textured and emotionally vast tapestry of human connection. But it’s no small detail that one of the screenplay’s most outwardly intellectual portions is where Okamoto felt most artistically inspired. This is a movie overflowing with big ideas, determined to imbue them into its intimate, character-driven story.

Hamaguchi tends to operate this way, most notably with Drive My Car, a three-plus-hour epic that won the 2022 Oscar for best international feature and received nominations for best picture, director and adapted screenplay — the only movie to do so in Japanese cinema history. His most recent drama, Evil Does Not Exist, examined the natural world as besieged by modern industry. With All of a Sudden, which like Drive My Car also runs more than three hours and will premiere at the Cannes Film Festival, he turns his attention to caretaking. Loosely adapted from the book You and I — The Illness Suddenly Get Worse (Léa Le Dimna co-wrote the screenplay with Hamaguchi), the film traces the deepening bond between Okamoto’s Mari, who is dying of cancer while staging a new production just off the Seine River, and Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira), the director of a nearby nursing home in Paris.

It’s an instant meeting of the souls. The two strangers first encounter each other in a park, where Mari invites Marie-Lou to see her show. Marie-Lou attends, finds herself extremely affected, and stays behind to chat with the writer about it — a bravura getting-to-know-you setpiece that becomes the first of many lengthy conversation scenes wherein Marie-Lou speaks in French and Mari in Japanese (except when they occasionally switch, meaning yes, each is fluent in both). Over just a few days, the deeper they dig, the more they come to rely on each other. This kind of mutual caretaking, physical as well as emotional, prods larger conversations about the state of the world — particularly, Marie-Lou’s nursing home facing a perpetual funding crisis.

“I was very sensitive to how intellectual the film was because the way of looking at things through otherness and this philosophical lens can broaden our horizons,” says Efira. “We shot in a working nursing home with real residents, and it was all about these bodies who are not functional anymore for capitalism. Then, Hamaguchi’s dialogue is extremely powerful to the point that it can combine the intimate and the political.”

Efira and Kodai Kurosaki in All of a Sudden.

Cannes Film Festival

The two stars came into All of a Sudden willing, even eager to completely surrender to the material, and that commitment shows in their finely tuned and vulnerable performances. Hamaguchi cast them with interest in their past individual work with noted directors: He quizzed Efira about her collaborations with Paul Verhoeven (Elle, Benedetta) and gushed to Okamoto about acting for James Mangold in, of all things, Wolverine. “I wouldn’t think he would be watching that type of movie,” Okamoto says with a laugh, “but he remembered me from that time, 13 years ago.”

That X-Men installment actually served as Okamoto’s film debut, following a successful modeling career that brought her to New York, and the Japanese native went on to star in other studio-driven Hollywood projects like Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice and The Man in the High Castle. In 2023, she moved back to Japan to refocus her career away from blockbusters, and toward auteur-driven cinema. Then Hamaguchi came calling. Okamoto pretended she knew French, since that was required of the role, before actually gaining

‘All of a Sudden’ Confronts Life, Death and the Failures of Capitalism