Viewing Log #1: Everyone Else (Maren Ade, 2009)

Part of me wishes I hadn't started watching Maren Ade's Everyone Else with high expectations, a mistake I seem to be making often these days. The film, Ade's second (I have not yet seen The Forest for the Trees) is about a couple vacationing in the island of Sardinia. This is the kind of movie where you don't get a lot of information about the characters right away; instead, you're made to observe them at length and given the opportunity to pick up what you can from small gestures and offhand exchanges, something I typically admire in a film. The protagonists of Everyone Else are Chris (Lars Eidinger) and Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr). He's an architect and she works for a record company's public relations department. They're spending the summer in Chris' parents' house in Sardinia, where they hang out by the pool reading (or, more accurately, he reads while she applies makeup on him and makes strange noises), avoid running into their annoying neighbor (who is also an architect and will play an important role during the second half of the film) and go hiking in the mountains (the site of one of their fights and one of the best sequences in the film). By all appearances, then, they're a happy couple sharing a vacation in a truly beautiful environment. However, if you've read anything at all about the film, then you know its subject is not merely two characters positioned in the Mediterranean landscape (although, on some level, of course it is), but rather the slow and subtle unraveling of their relationship. If you know this going into the film, as I did, you can start looking for the clues quite early and will quickly understand Ade's ability to work these in naturally into the couple's everyday interactions. For example, there's a moment early on when, having applied lipstick and eye shadow on Chris, Gitti is questioned as to whether or not she considers her boyfriend to be masculine. It's a fairly unimportant remark made by Chris, but its echo will be felt later on when Gitti begins to have doubts about how Chris conducts himself in his business and, by extension, in his relationship with her. All in all, Everyone Else is clearly a fascinating film. After spending two hours with these characters I can't say that I was ever remotely bored, mostly due to the terrific and naturalistic performances delivered by Minichmayr and Eidinger as well as Ade's elegant visual style, which is uniformly lovely. However, by the end I don't think I had gone through anything like the intense emotional experience others seem to have found while watching the film, but I look forward to revisiting Everyone Else in the hopes that Ade's intentions will become clearer.