After a somewhat quiet few days, the Cannes Film Festival is heating up with two big audience responses to buzzy films.
The first, earlier this afternoon was Jordan Firstman’s out-of-competition Club Kid, which got a lot of laughs and a 7-minute standing ovation.
Just minutes later came director Ryusuke Hamaguchi‘s All of a Sudden, which drew an effusive 11-minute cascade of applause punctuated by screams of “bravo” from the crowd. And that’s after sitting through the 3-hour-and-16-minute film, which is the longest in the competition this year.
While Firstman’s film got big laughs from the audience, All of a Sudden is a much more somber tale. In fact, it wasn’t hard to hear many in the audience weeping.
As the crowd acknowledged him afterward, Hamaguchi hugged festival director Thierry Fremáux and hugged him before grabbing the hands of castmembers Virginie Efira and Tao Okamoto and raising them in celebration.
The director adapted the story, with co-writer Lea Le Dimna, from a book, When Life Suddenly Takes a Turn: Twenty Letters Between a Philosopher with Terminal Cancer and a Medical Anthropologist. It is essentially a series of letters between philosopher Mikako Miyano, whose life takes a detour when she is diagnosed with cancer, and medical anthropologist Maho Osona. Inspired by this book, Hamaguchi felt France might be more open to a way into a film version than his native Japan. He has combined elements from both cultures to tell this fictionalized tale of the emerging relationship between two women, one, Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira), a health care director at a French nursing home and the other, a Japanese visiting stage director, Mari (Tao Okamoto) whose play dealing with a psychiatric ward has opened nearby.
