Confession: I am an absolute sucker for any movie in which a character grabs dry-erase markers and begins drawing diagrams to illustrate a novel theory about how capitalism, democracy, and the natural world interact.
That remarkable exegesis—and it is remarkable, as riveting a scene as Cannes has offered so far—takes place about an hour and 45 minutes into “All of a Sudden,” the Japanese director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s return to competition after “Drive My Car” in 2021. Is every one of the film’s 196 minutes necessary? Yes and no: One way of understanding the film’s worldview is that every minute we spend truly communicating with someone else is worthwhile.
This is a film that takes the time to understand two people deeply, and to watch them taking the time to understand each other. Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) is the director of a nursing home; Mari (Tao Okamoto) is a director of experimental theater. They meet by chance in Paris, and Mari invites Marie-Lou to a production that she is staging. Perhaps improbably, each is fluent in the other’s native language. It emerges that Marie-Lou studied anthropology at Wakeda University in Japan, while Mari studied philosophy at the Sorbonne. (The stars, meanwhile, apparently had to learn Japanese and French for their respective roles. Expect both to be frontrunners for the festival’s best-actress prize.)
The similarly named women also share a basic decency and generosity. At work, Marie-Lou is trying to introduce a patient-centered care method, Humanitude, and is facing resistance. The training is demanding and—as Marie-Lou explains in nearly as much detail as Mari uses in her capitalism-vs.-nature diagrams—the method won’t achieve its full benefits unless all the staff members participate.
For her part, Mari has, up to this point, kept private about the news that she is suffering from Stage 4 cancer. (The title refers to how quickly her final, fatal spiral may come.) Her theater piece, “Up Close, No One Is Normal,” performed by her creative partner, Goro (Kyozo Nagatsuka), concerns a psychiatrist named Franco Basaglia (1924-1980), who pushed for an end to mental hospitals as they existed in Italy. Instead, he favored a less carceral, more community-based approach.
Marie-Lou’s experience as a caregiver and Mari’s artistic skills make them an unlikely team. Mari visits Marie-Lou’s workplace; Marie-Lou travels to care for Mari in Kyoto. The film’s plea for careful listening and attention admittedly seems a little quixotic, even woo-woo, and the narrative might have benefited from some thorniness. There are times when I wondered if Hamaguchi was presenting a rosier depiction of end-of-life care—from the perspectives of both patients and medical professionals—than is plausible for most people. With the exception of a resentful, long-serving nurse, the characters are almost unfailingly kind to one another. And any fan of Frederick Wiseman’s institutional portraits might marvel at the relative placidity of Marie-Lou’s center, Garden of Freedom, although there is a subplot that concerns her bosses’ push to maximize profits.
Even so, the film is rooted in real life. Hamaguchi’s screenplay was inspired by a book called “When Life Suddenly Takes a Turn,” which consists of published correspondence between an anthropologist, Maho Isono, and a philosopher, Makiko Miyano. From this, he has created a narrative that has room to wander. The director has sporadically opted for drawn-out running times since at least the 317-minute “Happy Hour” in 2015, and like that film, “All of a Sudden” makes it all but impossible to distinguish between what’s indulgent and what’s essential. And frankly, I could have watched another hour of Mari drawing on her white board.
It’s been five years since the festival launched a new section called Cannes Premiere, and it’s still not clear to me what that section is supposed to be about. Some of the docket consists of directors the programmers usually like but apparently couldn’t bring themselves to put in competition (but also didn’t want to lose to Venice in the fall). The rest of the lineup seems to be films that might otherwise have landed in the long-running Un Certain Regard sidebar but were somehow deemed too commercial.
Géraldine Nakache’s “Think Good,” an engrossing portrait of a troubled marriage, falls into the mainstream category. Its main distinguishing factor is that several of its major characters are observant French Jews, a group that is not often seen onscreen. (Nor do I ever think I’ve seen a film about two French Jews who meet in Dubai and are married by a rabbi who is based there.)
In the opening scene, Gil (Monia Chokri) is shown visiting a mikvah, or ritual bath. When she returns home, she tells her husband, Jacques (Niels Schneider), that although she put her film-crew career on hold when their daughter was born, a cinematographer has offered her a temporary job. Jacques wonders if the gig will interfere with their plans to have a second child or if Gil will see her ex on the set. But that sort of pettiness turns out to be only the beginning.
Nakache uses a time-hopping structure to show how Jacques is not merely a jealous husband, but also an abusive one. He interferes with Gil’s contact with family and friends. He sets up baby-monitor cameras to surveil her in the house. He makes obsessive phone calls to keep her from her career. The title refers to a line in which Gil is encouraged to resort to self-delusion: “If you think good,” she is told, “only good things will happen.” The story’s trajectory is fairly predictable, but a powerful final shot closes the movie on a strong note, and Chokri’s volatile, layered performance carries the film.
