The Oscar-winning Japanese director Hamaguchi is a master of dialogue, silence and tenderness. Bringing together two women whose encounter rewrites both of their fates, he offers a healing cinematic odyssey between France and Japan. As the roles of caregiver and patient shift, standout actresses – Belgium’s Virginie Efira and Japan’s Tao Okamoto – share the screen, having both won the Best Actress award at the Cannes Film Festival.

Marie-Lou is the dedicated director of a for-profit nursing home in Paris and a pioneer of a new attitude to care services. Her entire life is devoted to others, which is why she wants to establish an innovative approach to care work—one aimed at restoring dignity to elderly patients, something the underfunded healthcare system treats as a luxury and a waste of time. Unexpectedly, she meets a boy and a group of visiting artists from Japan. The newly met theatre director, Mare, invites Marie-Lou to a performance, and life brings a sudden shift in their identities. They are left questioning what it means to help someone when it seems seemingly impossible.

By acting out a story of separation in the theatre and inside a bright red Saab in the film Drive My Car (2021), Hamaguchi won the Oscar for Best International Feature Film. In his subsequent works, he has continued to explore human communication and care for one another – treating them as virtually the same ethical action. In his latest drama, which reveals the passing of time that becomes truly tangible only a couple of times in our lives, Hamaguchi directs his first non-Japanese film. The author takes inspiration from a correspondence between philosopher Makiko Miyano and medical anthropologist Maho Isono: what does it mean to be alongside someone and to care for them? Can conversations heal? This work is like a version of Bergman’s Persona (1966) set between the Seine and Shinano rivers, full of humanitude and completely devoid of coldness. Two women become one; the empathy and kindness of Efira’s and Okamoto’s characters remind us of what cinema can be and what life could be like if we paid more attention to the moments of silence between words.