Auto Review – a home care drama that is compassionate, meditative and very valuable at its best | Cannes Film Festival

Fserious illness, like falling in love, can happen suddenly – even if the film doesn’t say that. Drive My Car Director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new film, written by Hamaguchi and Franco-Japanese screenwriter Léa Le Dimna and his first film not set in Japan, is a daring and evocative work that spans three hours. It’s compassionate and sometimes beautifully made, but it’s also well-crafted and sometimes has people who care too much to be true. Honestly, it’s priceless.

Hamaguchi and Le Dimna take as their starting point the fictional book Inu ni Ine: The Illness Suddenly Get Worse by Makiko Miyano and Maho Isono, meditative letters between a philosopher and a medical expert on matters of love and death. Hamaguchi has opened this to create an established drama Paris and Kyoto, and it is hard not to doubt that Hamaguchi, as a director of many popular films who spends a lot of time at international festivals, was led to create an international mix.

Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) is the director of a private care home in Paris called the Garden of Freedom, where she uses a method of care called “humanity”, a method of treating patients that angers the former nurse Sophie (Marie Bunel). It takes more workers than the house can handle and, in any case, Marie-Lou has a bad habit of taking care of those who ask her. Through it all, there are beautiful scenes with both caregivers and patients, and the moments of pure, unrequited compassion are what make the film work so well.

Marie-Lou is stressed and overworked, and her life takes a turn for the worse when she meets a young Japanese teenager named Tomoki (Kodai Kurosaki) on the street, seemingly lost; under the supervision of his grandfather, Gorô (Kyōzō Nagatsuka), an actor in town working on a mental health experiment in which Tomoki is encouraged to participate if he feels it. The show is directed by Mari (Tao Okamoto), and her calm and intelligent personality rubs off on Marie-Lou; they clearly are close to a strong friendship and maybe more, although the film does not stop at this last point.

Marie-Lou comes to the show, stays for the Q&A afterwards and shows off her fluency in Japanese, and questions Mari in that language about Mari’s terrible illness. Some of the audience instead of complaining – and understandably – call for the conversation to be in French, although the film is close to being unacceptable when Gorô tells everyone that their exchange was so intimate and meaningful that the audience should be content to just hear that.

Mari and Marie-Lou hang out all night. They go to the care home for a long conversation in the break room, filled with educational material written on the white board: about how capitalism works against care, destroys the environment which is insects and will eventually destroy itself. The two travel together to Kyoto, where Mari’s condition – unexpectedly, which doesn’t make things any easier to bear – takes a turn for the worse. Marie-Lou invites him back to live in the care home as a gym manager, and if there are any problems with hiring a dying person, and encouraging the residents to form a relationship with him, the film is apparently unaware of it. (The story of the plot in the past to open the rooms of the maintenance workers for them to live in may have been designed to help this.)

Suddenly it works very well outside of the agreement that Mari and Marie-Lou wrote. The realist pieces are very moving, showing us dementia patients surrounded by their families, and showing us, often with pictures of their young children at work, how these patients have changed. The high point of this film is a bit of self-confidence.