The Auteurs Daily: NYFF. Everyone Else

"Following her 2003 debut The Forest for the Trees, 32-year-old German writer-director Maren Ade's trenchant, funny, and sensitive Everyone Else (Alle Anderen) cuts deeper than an Oscar season's worth of emotional turmoil," writes Aaron Hillis, introducing his interview with the director for the Voice. "It's not so much about a deteriorating relationship between young architect Chris (Lars Eidinger) and rock publicist Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr, who snagged the Best Actress Award at this year's Berlinale) as it is an exploration of their vibrant yet volatile mismatched union over the span of a Sardinian vacation."

"Perhaps little of what gets praised about Everyone Else will thrill people into going," concedes Nicholas Rapold in the L Magazine. "Ade has made a strangely calm yet charged drama about a highly specific but rarely captured portion of a relationship. This is the unnerving crackle in the air before a storm, followed by the realization that the storm has hit and gone before you knew it was happening."

"Ade has an intense affinity for authentic, natural moments of interpersonal disintegration that's miles above that other 2009 festival movie about love on the rocks. It's the anti-Antichrist." Kevin B Lee, who interviewed Ade for The Auteurs back in February: "Not only is Everyone Else an instant contender for the pantheon of breakup movies, its manifold splendors evoke entire periods of great cinema. Its playful slapstick and eruptions of regressive childishness between its leads are worthy of 30s Hollywood screwball. Ade's instinct for awkward silences, combined with the way Bernhard Keller's camera emphasizes people within the spaces they occupy, coveys temporal and spatial alienation up there with an earlier generation of European modernist love stories: Voyage to Italy, L'Avventura, and Contempt. And then of course there's Cassavetes with the celebration of spontaneous expressive kookiness."

"Even within the oft-traversed cinematic terrain of romantic skepticism, this is rarely explored territory," writes Karina Longworth at the SpoutBlog. "It's extremely difficult to use traditional narrative tools to depict how sometimes one person seems to be at least two people, how that changeover happens almost imperceptibly, and how this personality schizophrenia can be a result of outside forces and how outsiders are forced to adapt accordingly. Ade pulls it off."

"There is nothing natural about self-aware performance, particularly performance that has to carry the weight of believability and the entire narrative on its usually inexperienced shoulders," writes Tom Hall. "Everyone Else absolutely crushes this idea by using the tools of cinema to create space for performance and by allowing the story, as intimate as it may be, to lay underneath the actors; Ade uses performance as a palimpsest instead of a showy pillar, allowing the actors to convey real feeling and move their way through believable, emotionally complex moments that have multiple beats, that develop, that breathe and feel very much alive."

Update, 10/10: "Ade insightfully uses flat compositions and medium shots to de-dramatize the action, creating a neutral framing that reflects the fluid dynamics intrinsic in the formation and dissolution of all relationships," notes Acquarello.

Update, 10/31: Scott Foundas talks with Ade for the LA Weekly.

NYFF 09: Index; full coverage.