Two women in one hospital cafeteria: Hamaguchi's quiet Cannes triumph

The cafeteria of a Paris hospital. A white table. Two women in their late forties, one French, one Japanese, meeting for the first time in their lives.

One is the wife of a man dying in the same hospital from a rare autoimmune disease. The other is his out-of-wedlock daughter, arriving from Tokyo because she has heard that the father she has not seen since she was twelve is no longer breathing on his own.

The conversation lasts four minutes and sixty seconds, conducted with mutual compassion and a quiet curiosity. Not a single spoken emotion. Fifteen exchanges that build what the rest of the film, across years of narrative time, never quite manages.

That is the strongest scene of “All of a Sudden”, the one around which the reviews gathered after the premiere in the Grand Theatre Lumiere at the 79th Cannes Film Festival. Ryusuke Hamaguchi, the Japanese director who won the Best International Feature Oscar in 2022 with “Drive My Car”, this time received the Best Actress prize ex aequo.

The award was shared by Virginie Efira (the Belgian-French actress playing Antoinette, the wife) and Tao Okamoto (the Japanese actress playing Aoi, the daughter). The jury, presided over by Park Chan-wook, decided to make the award joint because, in its reasoning, the two performances form a mutual mirror, and separating them would have no dramaturgical sense.

What the film says, and what it does not

Hamaguchi’s films work on the principle of the absent expressive gesture. “All of a Sudden” is a film in which the thing that could happen never quite happens, and what unfolds instead is whatever is waiting to be spoken.

The two protagonists share the screen for only 22 of the film’s 152 minutes. The rest is given to their separate worlds:

• Antoinette goes to work, sorts rare books in a library, feeds the cat, opens a window
• Aoi runs a small contemporary art gallery in Shibuya, takes inventory of photographs, pays the rent
• neither in Paris nor in Tokyo do larger dramas or catharses arrive

Hamaguchi lingers on each of these scenes until the audience begins to recognise routine as a form of grief that does not ask for a name.

The central question the film poses is what two complete strangers can learn from one another in an hour, when they meet through a shared mourning. Hamaguchi’s answer is not the conventional consolation. After the hospital cafeteria, Antoinette and Aoi do not meet again. They exchange brief messages over the following weeks, then fade into silence, with the suggestion that they may one day meet again, or may not.

It is an open ending that is neither romantic nor tragic, simply realistic to a degree few European or American films sustain.

Two actresses, two cinematic traditions

Virginie Efira has become one of the most recognisable French actresses of the past decade, with a career in the work of Paul Verhoeven, Justine Triet and Jacques Audiard. After “Madame de Sevigne” two years ago and last year’s “Tout est pardonne”, this is her third role as a woman in her late forties confronting a shift in her life’s coordinates.

Her on-screen presence in “All of a Sudden” is pared back. Minimal makeup, simple costumes. Exactly what Hamaguchi asks for.

Tao Okamoto is recognised in Japan less as a film actress than as a model who has appeared in several American studio productions. Here she gets her first genuine authorial role.

Hamaguchi, in an interview with Cahiers du cinema, said he chose her because her face carries “a minimal history”, a phrase that in Japanese theatrical usage means a performer who has not been overused in recognisable roles. After this film, Okamoto returns to Japan to shoot Hamaguchi’s next production.

She plays Aoi as someone who can approach another person, but never in a way that requires that person to understand her.

Where Hamaguchi’s method stands now

Hamaguchi has spent the last ten years making films in roughly two-year intervals. With “All of a Sudden”, he shifts from Japanese to international production.

“Drive My Car” already had a bilingual structure, but “All of a Sudden” is the first of his films in which half the dialogue is in French. That means his directorial poetic has entered a phase where it can be applied outside the Japanese scene.

For a serious author this is a useful moment, because it shows that his method is not local specificity but a general cinematic grammar. Cannes critics called it “the first Hamaguchi that is not Japanese”, which is not quite accurate, since the film still carries a fascination only a Japanese filmmaker can hold in its natural form.

The film will probably enter Belgrade distribution in autumn, once rights with Le Pacte, the French distributor that holds Eastern European territories, are settled. The local premiere is expected at the MTS Hall or at Cineplexx Usce, with a musical accompaniment the organisers have not yet announced.

Does a shared prize diminish individual performance?

A question raised in the Cannes film press this year, after two consecutive ex aequo acting prizes, is worth opening here as well.

The same jury handed two acting prizes each to two protagonists. A precedent that will not easily be repeated. Hamaguchi’s film justifies the decision because Antoinette and Aoi exist only as a pair, not as single roles.

“All of a Sudden” is Hamaguchi’s most precisely shot film since “Drive My Car”. If it gets a full-screen release in Belgrade, it will find the audience that watches films of watching, not films of events.

What do you think: can a dramaturgical pair in a film where two roles share only 15 percent of the running time carry the entire emotional weight of the narrative?