Cannes film festival: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ocean-hopping treatise on love and mortality is undeniably beautiful – but it works best in its quieter, compassionate moments rather than the flurries of self-conscious solemnity
Falling seriously ill, like falling in love, can happen all of a sudden – although this film is not exactly about either. Drive My Car director Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s new movie, co-scripted by Hamaguchi with the Franco-Japanese screenwriter Léa Le Dimna and his first not set entirely in Japan, is a bold and high-minded if rather pedagogic work that spreads itself over three hours. It’s tender and sometimes beautifully made, but also contrived and occasionally features some too-good-to-be-true caring characters. Frankly, it’s rather precious.
Hamaguchi and Le Dimna have taken as their starting point the nonfiction book You and I: The Illness Suddenly Get Worse by Makiko Miyano and Maho Isono, a meditative correspondence between a philosopher and medical professional on the subjects of love and mortality. Hamaguchi has opened this out to create a drama set in Paris and Kyoto, and it’s incidentally hard not to suspect that Hamaguchi, like many a celebrated movie director spending so much time on the international festival circuit, has been led to create an uneasy international mixture.
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Cannes film festival: Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s ocean-hopping treatise on love and mortality is undeniably beautiful – but it works best in its quieter, compassionate moments rather than the flurries of self-conscious solem...
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