Everyone Else

The Cinema Guild

Details

Everyone Else
Lagoon Cinema, starts Friday

Related Content

• Dogtooth, The Ghost Writer, and more: Top 10 Films of 2010
  December 29, 2010
• Your M-SPIFF 12-Pack
  April 19, 2006
• Tuesday audio: James Baldwin and Malcolm X
  April 25, 2006

More About

• Maren Ade
• Sana
• Nicole Marischka
• Lars Eidinger
• Hans-Jochen Wagner

An exercise in voyeurism, Maren Ade's superbly performed, emotionally graphic Everyone Else is more fascinating than enjoyable. Placing a youngish, newly formed couple under relentless observation, Ade's two-hour squirmathon gets a bit more intimate on the subject of intimacy than the viewer might wish. Chris (Lars Eidinger), an underemployed architect, and Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr), a middling music-industry publicist, take a week to culture their relationship in the Petri dish of his parents' haute-bourgeois Sardinian villa. The serpent enters this vacation paradise midway through in the form of another, more successful and seemingly happier pair—Hans (Hans-Jochen Wagner), a former schoolmate of Chris's, and Sana (Nicole Marischka), a clothing designer. A barbecue at Hans and Sana's is not only discomfiting but also divisive—it creates a triangle. Chris, desperate for Hans's approval, abandons Gitti to have a drink with him the next afternoon. Act III culminates with a reciprocal dinner invitation, the viewer wondering exactly how the simmering hostility—not to mention the yearning—will bubble over. Predicated on a succession of intractable moments, Everyone Else is concentrated enough to become experiential. Ade's exploration of intimacy and its discontents recalls the European relationship epics of 35 years ago—Rivette's L'amour fou, Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage—but it's purposefully down-sized and set in a lower key. The tumult ends with a simple request that more or less recaps the entire movie: Chris asks Gitti only to look at him.