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 saw an effusive 11-minute cascade of applause punctuated by screams of “bravo” from the enthusiastic crowd. And that’s after sitting through the 3-hour-and-16-minute film, which is the longest in the competition this year.
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During the acknowledgment, Hamaguchi grabbed the hands of his cast and raised 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.
