Two Highlights From the New York Film Festival Main Slate 

In the first part of my round-up of this year’s New York Film Festival Main Slate, I took the German art-house darling Everytime to task for making its characters’ pain at least partly subservient to its writer/director’s attempts at her own milquetoast version of formal experimentation. Thankfully, the great British filmmaker Mike Leigh’s latest film, Tender Loving Care, offers a welcome riposte. If anything, it’s about people who maybe care a little too much. Both Rosie (Alice Bailey Johnson) and Amy (Kate O’Flynn, recent Emmy winner for Widow’s Bay) are social workers in London who strive to do their jobs as well as possible despite funding cuts and general social indifference. No wonder they’re always seen drinking wine together at night to cope with the psychological challenges.

The working-class struggles glimpsed in Rosie and Amy’s on-the-job interactions contrast with the comfortable middle-class existence of Amy’s parents, Geoff (Paul Jesson) and Birdie (Marion Bailey), both of them retired and sensitive to their daughter’s difficulties (Amy, for her part, recently decided to divorce her husband and move in with Rosie, though she’s strangely reluctant to let her parents know about the split at first). Eventually, though, Geoff starts to show signs of dementia, a development that occupies much of the film’s second half.

Compared to Leigh’s previous film, Hard Truths (my favorite film of the 2024 New York Film Festival), Tender Loving Care is one of his warmer and more relaxed works. An undercurrent of social critique gives it some edge, however: the sense that social workers like Rosie and Amy aren’t being allowed to do their jobs properly thanks to an uncaring, miserly government. Overall, though, an air of august melancholy distinguishes this from most of his other films. Leigh (now 83) has publicly stated that this is probably his last film, and an awareness of mortality haunts even this film’s looser and funnier moments. There’s no clearer sign of this being Leigh’s probable swan song than Geoff, recalling a recurring dream he’s had throughout his life, repeatedly uttering the word “swans” on his potential deathbed. It would certainly be a fitting capstone to a distinguished career.

Elder care is one of the threads of All of a Sudden, the latest film from Drive My Car auteur Ryusuke Hamaguchi, and easily my favorite film of this year’s New York Film Festival (and possibly of the year so far). Marie-Lou (Virginie Efira) is the director of a nursing home near Paris, but she’s on the verge of burnout trying to keep the institution financially afloat while also training her staff in a new, more humane approach to their work, one that not everyone on the staff is on board with.

Marie-Lou’s chance encounter with avant-garde theater director Mari (Tao Okamoto), however, leads her to attend a performance of Mari’s latest work. Marie-Lou finds herself deeply moved by the way Mari’s piece speaks directly to her own experiences and aspirations with the nursing home she oversees. They strike up a friendship, the film’s centerpiece dramatic sequence being a lengthy conversation that features, among other things, Mari literally taking out a whiteboard and working out a theory of why capitalism will ultimately falter in a democracy.

The film is hardly a Godardian political dialectic masquerading as a drama, however. Mari, it turns out, is herself dying from a fatal illness; the film’s title is her way of characterizing the way doctors have told her she will know the end is near. Questions of legacy inevitably pop up in Mari’s mind as a result — a concern that Marie-Lou, thanks to her nursing home, turns out to be in a unique position to address by allowing Mari to come on as a resident artist.

All of a Sudden takes Drive My Car‘s dramatization of the cathartic power of artistic creation a step further, celebrating its possibility to inspire empathy even amid the most difficult (read: capitalistic) of circumstances. But this immensely rich film is most moving as the chronicle of a profound female bond. It’s no surprise that Efira and Okamoto won a joint Best Actress prize at Cannes earlier this year. What develops between them is the kind of keenly observed, deeply felt relationship that radiates goodness and purity — qualities that seem in short supply in the world these days.