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Unwed bliss: young German director Maren Ade’s second feature, “Everyone Else,” is that rare thing, an elusive story told with gratifying precision, a sun-dappled noir of the heart, capturing the confident yet still tentative erotic gestures of a couple, an architect (Lars Eidinger) and a publicist (Birgit Minichmayr) in the early ache of couplehood, on a vacation, still learning to take and give from each other, still revealing themselves, still distancing themselves, when a second couple crosses their path. Eden is for lovers, then others. There’s more than a little of Antonioni in Ade’s way of defining her characters and their relationships obliquely: they move through well-defined spaces but remain more mysterious than the cheery, lovely Sardinian topography. Ade is from a younger generation than Christian Petzold (“Jerichow,” “Yella,”) but she shares an interest in combining the specific with the elusive, seeking emotional states that come through close, unsparing inspection. (Her work is a little funnier than her fellow German’s.) She may well move farther into the territory of Ingmar Bergman with further films; “Everyone Else” tiptoes into “Scenes From Not-a-Marriage” at more than one splendid moment. The last scene—the last line—leaves an audience tingling. 119m. (Ray Pride)
“Everyone Else” opens Friday at Siskel. The trailer is below.
Ray Pride is Newcity’s film critic and a contributing editor to Filmmaker magazine.
His multimedia history of Chicago “Ghost Signs” will be published soon. Previews of the project are on Twitter and on Instagram as Ghost Signs Chicago. More photography on Instagram.
