Everyone Else

Directed by Maren Ade

(Germany, 2009)

This new film by Maren Ade captures the tedium of summer vacations when regular responsibilities disappear and all that’s left is self-entertainment. When young Germans, Chris and Gitta—who met in a disco not long before—share a two-week vacation in Sardinia in the bourgeois home of Chris’s parents, the languid days create space for all the cracks in their relationship to surface. Chris (Lars Eidinger) is an ambitious architect with aesthetic ideals, now suffering depression because the architectural world finds his work too complex—he can’t get a job, or one he’s willing to take. Gitta (Birgit Minichmayr) is a feisty, funky, emotionally unbalanced and immature record label publicist. She’s likable, whereas Chris’s conceit makes him less likable. They are an incongruous couple that got involved as a result of instant physical attraction at a disco. Thus they are like most young lovers, and the movie is a trip down memory lane for lovers of any era. It’s about male-female relationships that start out one way and end up another, because over time, inevitably, grievances and dislikes arise. Some couples might have more interests, social class, or education in common than Chris and Gitta, but they won’t be spared the same kinds of conflict depicted in the movie.

Another couple, Hans and Sana, juxtapose Chris and Gitta. They come from Chris’s bourgeois world with its “polite” conventions that everyone follows. Gitta is different. She comes from the bohemian art world where brash but honest self-expression is acceptable. She’s an embarrassment to Chris, which throws her into confusion, causes her to lose her self-confidence as a woman in love. The audience is on her side—who would want to be like Hans and Sana, or Chris for that matter? Yet we wouldn’t want to be like Gitta either—her world is too half-baked and emotionally volatile. She’s satisfied to pursue pleasures in life—discos, alcohol, boat rides, sex, anything that stimulates the senses. So the movie passes the vacation days with the couple expressing passion and love followed by deep, irreconcilable breaches. The pattern continues to the last lights of the movie, for once again, in the last scene, Gitta opens her heart and arms to Chris instead of saying goodbye. He has already destroyed her but true to life she cannot set herself free just yet. Also true to life, the detested woman has propped up her man; Gitta’s energy, enthusiasm for life, and practicality (female qualities in a relationship) give Chris the push he needs to accept a local renovation job beneath his talents and ideals. Once he starts, he finds he likes the work and his motivation returns. His future has launched.

This is a movie for young audiences who love to see themselves and their relationship issues through lovers like Chris and Gitta. Additionally, at the film’s climatic moment, the couple’s complete act of love from start to finish may keep them breathless. Filming coitus graphically raises questions: why do humans like to sit in chairs as a group and watch bodies thump around until climax? Sex is so very intimate, between two people, and when performed for viewers, who watch hungrily, the intimacy is lost. Are there members of the audience like me, who don’t want to watch the arena version of sex? It loses its beauty. But obviously there’s a voyeur market out there or filmmakers wouldn’t turn out so many graphic sex scenes. In contrast, Zefferelli’s post-coitus scene of naked Romeo next to tender Juliet spellbinds. It tingles with beauty, with the moment of lost virginity for both. Chris and Gitta in no way melt our hearts the way Romeo and Juliet do, so that their sex, which is part of their pattern of love-dislike, fails to draw us in with romantic rapture.

Nevertheless, the story of Chris and Gitta is a real one and timeless. Couples intimate behavior hasn’t evolved. Besides the film’s mismatched couple theme and its passion-at-first, fault-finding-later theme, it also shows the male ego and its innate programming to crush a female partner, partly in response to the female’s strength, practicality, and ability to take on life. After the crushing, the ego regrets and doesn’t want to be abandoned, doesn’t want to lose its support. Everyone Else does a good job depicting relationships.

For screening times visit the San Francisco International Film Festival http://fest10.sffs.org

© 2010 Gail Spilsbury, all rights reserved

Photo: www.sffs.org