Everyone Else

Alle Anderen

(Germany, 2009, 120 mins, 35mm)

PRODS: Janine Jackowski, Dirk Engelhardt, Maren Ade
SCR: Maren Ade
CAM: Bernhard Keller
ED: Heike Parplies
Cast: Birgit Minichmayr, Lars Eidinger, Hans-Jochen Wagner, Nicole Marischka, Mira Partecke

An alternately loving and feuding couple vacations on Sardinia: he, Chris, a struggling, perhaps visionary architect (Lars Eidinger); she, Gitti, a music publicist (Birgit Minichmayr). As long as they exist in an hermetic sphere of their own creation, with their own rules, they are comfortable in their bodies. Theirs is a uniquely defined interaction where he is the more "feminine" partner, while she, first seen performing a rather vicious and pointed example of bad parenting, constantly struggles to put on a dress. This binary way of defining a person sets up the framework Maren Ade uses to investigate deeper issues associated with a coupling. Aided by actors who are fearless in exploring their own bodies and minds, she transforms a familiar story into an emotional tour de force.

Though hinting at the type of relationship dissected in Rossellini's Voyage to Italy, perhaps the film that has yielded the most fruitful points of overlap, Ade's second film--winner of two Silver Bears in Berlin--is a new kind of relationship drama where shifts in point of view are subtle and never clearly indicated; just when you think you've grasped the film, it slips away, like grains of sand through your fingers. A generational portrait, Everyone Else is a step up from Ade's more aggressively focused yet easier to digest debut, The Forest for the Trees, and also a different kind of experience than posed by such a normally conventional type of cinema. This is a film at times psychological, at times theatrical and/or childish, at all times, realistic and honest.

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