NYFF64 Diary, Day 3 ~ More TK @ da Movies

My first confirmation that we'd just seen a masterpiece was an older-middle-aged woman who, as we all filed out of the theatre, stayed in her seat with a completely shattered look on her face and a hand over her mouth.

Suffice it to say that I'm finding it difficult to talk about Ryûsuke Hamaguchi's new film “All of a Sudden” without devolving into hyperbole or dramatics. I think it just really is that good.

Set largely in Paris, the film follows nursing-home director Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) during a transitional period—she assumed the top post at Garden of Freedom and implemented a humane caregiving initiative called Humanitude that, of course, requires a lot of training and time and money. Now, two years into a four-year changeover from the prior caregiving regime to Humanitude, Marie-Lou confronts budgetary challenges and staff departures—those who don't believe in Humanitude are quick to loudly denounce the project, or leave altogether for better pay. A chance encounter with a lost, severely-autistic young Japanese man in a local park leads her to meet theatre director Mari, who's in a transitional period of her own—her cancer is back, and it's terminal, and she's going to die soon. They realize they speak each other’s languages fluently, having learned them at another transitional point in their lives—Mari studied philosophy at the Sorbonne, while Marie-Lou travelled to Waseda University in Tokyo to study anthropology.

Then, they talk. For a day, a night, and a day, Mari and Marie-Lou engage in a kind of extended dialectic about everything—art, capitalism, elder care, smoking, language itself. Everything but themselves.

That extended conversation loops and evolves and explores what Melissa Anderson called, "a world awaiting definition," in Film Comment. They are both trapped in and liberated by dialectic, by conversation, and by presence—they want to solve the worlds around them, but they know they can't, and they can't work their way around how to make the impact they know they should with the resources they have. They want to resolve the problems of their communities and their world, but they find the point where resolutions become too theoretical or unsatisfying, and then they move past it, because they're people, and they're friends, and they eat noodles together, and the sun will rise and life will go on, until it doesn't.

And now, for your consideration, here is exactly a hundred words on “Digger,” the newest attempt at a noble mess from Alejandro González Iñárritu, spoilers and all.

I don't think it works, basically, but that's more because it's doing a lot than that it's not doing anything. There's this bombastic energy that's packed into every frame, and for that I'm at least moderately grateful—lots of prop artist and set decorators got to eat off this movie. Performances are mixed, but trend huge before anything else, except rather than commit to that “Strangelove”-esque tone throughout there's this odd dip into a play within a play, and all of Iñárritu's Ideas About Theatre As Transformative And/Or Healing can't ever cleanly bridge the gap between those two modes of expression.

More tk,

Luis

Neon © 2026

Writing soundtrack