Takashima Yasushi | Hamaguchi Ryusuke "Suddenly Feeling Unwell"
Takashima Yasushi reviews Hamaguchi Ryusuke's "Suddenly Feeling Unwell," analyzing its staging of capitalism and care.Summary
This review by Takashima Yasushi discusses Hamaguchi Ryusuke's first overseas-location film, "Suddenly Feeling Unwell." Set in a care facility called "Garden of Freedom" outside Paris, it follows director Marie-Lou as she struggles to implement the "Humanitude" care method, which treats dementia patients as human beings with souls. She faces staff shortages, low wages, and resistance from workers who fear increased burdens and fall risks, while she herself is overworked. After protecting an autistic boy in a park, she meets Mari, a Japanese theater director staging a one-man play performed by an actor named Goro. The play-within-the-play centers on Franco Basaglia, the psychiatrist who abolished mental asylums in Italy, and shows the destruction and creation of institutions and consciousness. Mari has been diagnosed with terminal cancer, and the two women grow close as they face their respective struggles.
The film is not merely about caregiving, care, and dignity; it is also about caring for and recovering the social body afflicted by the pathology of capitalism. Mari gives an improvised lecture on capitalism in the facility, explaining debt deferred to future generations, the constant discovery and exploitation of an "outside," the incorporation of the body, war as a temporary outside, and capitalism's self-destructive nature. This lecture-performance addresses Marie-Lou as its sole audience member and, potentially, all viewers of the film. Their relationship involves a reciprocal exchange of "techniques as knowledge," including Marie-Lou's demonstration of Humanitude and Mari's palliative care and workshops.
The review analyzes recurring structures, the twice-performed play-within-the-play, barefoot workshops massaging each other's soles, the semi-open courtyard as a boundary space, and nighttime conversations followed by dawn skies. It argues that these gift-like exchanges resist capitalist economies and that the film calls for questioning efficiency and productivity while seeking recovery for a diseased structure itself.
(Source：artscape)