Everyone Else (Rhoades)

“Everyone Else” Is The Yardstick
Reviewed by Shirrel Rhoades

Someone suggested this would be the kind of story Jane Austen might write if she lived today. Maybe, if instead of writing romantic fiction set among the gentry she’d focused on a dull German couple in the throes of coming to terms with their relationship.

Gitti (Briget Minichmayr) and Chris (Lars Eidinger) are a happy couple who happen to bump into Sana (Nicole Marischka) and Hans (Hans-Jochen Wagner) while vacationing on the Mediterranean island of Sardinia. This foursome invites comparison, causing Gitti and Chris to question their own fragile relationship.

After all, Gitti is more outgoing, easily expressing her love for Chris. But her partner is more reserved, hesitant to dance with her, evasive in his feelings.

“Sometimes I think I’d like to be different,” she says.

But Chris is a man wallowing in his lack of success as an architect, not eager to face change. His or hers.

Are the underpinnings of this relationship sound? This intimate examination has been described as a “two-hour squirmathon.”

“Everyone Else” (or “Alle Anderen” in German) is playing at the Tropic Cinema.

Writer-director Maren Ade (“Hotel Very Welcome”) offers us plenty of “sex, fighting, affection, and insults.” She shows it to us from a woman’s viewpoint. A relationship measured – as the title says – against everyone else.

srhoades@aol.com
[from Solares Hill]