FILM / Trouble in Paradise: Maren Ade's "Everyone Else" / Kevin Parks
Image © Komplizen Film
Vacations are exhausting. And what’s most exasperating about German writer/director Maren Ade’s Everyone Else (2009) is that there’s no escaping the claustrophobic world she’s created. The volatile coupling of Chris (Lars Eidinger) and Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr), holed up together at Chris’ parents’ Sardinian villa, defies any expectations for a customary on-screen getaway. With a precise and unrelenting microscope, Ade gives the audience just enough space to develop sympathy for these flawed, frustrating characters, only to have Chris and Gitti disappoint all stakeholders (including each other) in the next scene. After all, what is a vacation, if not a set-up for failure. Ade’s bruising, battling antiheroes would be more at home in a chaotic Rainer-Werner Fassbinder melodrama, or a wailing John Cassavetes psychodrama than at play in a sun-soaked paradise, where their reactive, impulsive behavior inevitably leads to self-destruction.
If the plot of the movie—a bickering couple spending a holiday at a free rental—suggests a lightweight comedy of manners, Ade takes pleasure in upending familiar expectations. The tone is set in the brilliant opening, in which Chris and Gitti are chasing two children around a pool. Are they father and mother? The frantic oversight and waning patience feels utterly realistic for either fatigued young parents or detached babysitters going through the motions. When Chris’s sister returns to claim her children, she compliments how natural he looks with a boy on his hip. Meanwhile, Gitti is chasing after and screaming at the daughter, eventually encouraging the young girl to yelp “I hate you!” to Gitti, and shoot her with a pretend gun, leaving Gitti face-down in the pool. The contrast on display anticipates—without a heavy hand—how these opposites might struggle to maintain a harmonious attraction.
Chris is an architect, preoccupied with work and the allusive validation (and funding) he’s seeking for a passion project. Gitti’s more casual, the free spirit of the relationship whose preferred attire is soccer shorts and a bikini top, and she has an easier time leaving work to the office. There’s an edge to Chris, which Gitti attempts to soften with physical affection and humor. But, Chris won’t meet her halfway, hiding his feelings and burrowing more deeply. Gitti meets his resistance head on, making plans to go dancing with Chris or a sailing double-date with some locals she met. When he rebuffs both offers, Chris counters by bringing Gitti upstairs to his mom’s room, playing kitschy pop records and tinkering with her bizarre collection of tchotchkes. At the end of the night, they’ll have sex, but Chris is silent and stoic, refusing to reciprocate when Gitti says, “I love you,” on repeat.
These two dance a rudimentary tango of emotional withholding and mounting grudges. For all their constant motion and inside jokes, Chris and Gitti are expert avoidance artists. Chris will say he’s meeting a friend, then Gitti will find him eating alone. On a walk to the beach, Gitti will reverse course and go back to the villa, and Chris walks in on her begging a client to call her to say she’s needed so Gitti can cut the vacation short. When Chris reveals that he heard the entire conversation, Gitti demures, saying, “Oh. Well, I don’t love you.” It’s a laugh out loud moment with teeth, but it’s clearly a bluff, representing the beginning in a series of simmering provocations intended to rattle Chris into attention or submission.
That simmer bursts to full boil when Chris encounters an old architecture school buddy on the island. At first, Chris dodges Hans (Hans-Jochen Wagner), hopping over a fence when he’s approaching the backyard, and ducking into an aisle to hide in the supermarket. Gitti’s confused, and maybe curious about Chris’s unexplained animosity, especially when Chris accepts an invitation on their behalf to have dinner with Hans and his pregnant wife Sana (Nicole Marischka). A cock-eyed standard of domestic bliss, Hans and Sana are an aspirational couple, foils for Chris and Gitti both in terms of Hans’ relative professional success (the provider) and Sana’s calm, submissive demeanor and full belly (the caretaker).
Hans talks down to Chris, suggesting that he should be striving for more commercial success, and makes an unprompted offer to make introductions to improve Chris’s status among peers. All the while, the guests regard Gitti as an afterthought, someone whose job (public relations for The Shames, a rock group) is the subject of a parlor game to Sana (who guessed Gitti was a photojournalist) and Hans (assumed she was a kindergarten teacher). Chris laughs at this, not in defense of Gitti, instead he piles on with a hurtful comment about Gitti’s insufficient motherly instinct with his sister’s kids. The most shocking and aggressive onslaught is when Hans and Chris charge at Gitti and Sana and, despite their screaming objections—and the fact that Sana’s pregnant—tosses them in the pool. Sana laughs it off, and Gitti’s furious, especially when Sana meets her in the kitchen after and expects Gitti to fetch a towel.
The surfeit of micro- and mondo-aggressions justifies some type of retaliation, and Ade has a major talent for crafting scenarios that turn awkward social encounters to tragicomic dumpster fires. Ade’s debut, The Forest For the Trees (2003), was a slow-burning, off-kilter portrait of Melanie (Eva Löbau), a lonely teacher trying to make friends in an unfamiliar town. She’s sweet and harmless but so blind to boundaries that her neighbor Tina (Daniela Holtz) has to start ghosting her. When Tina breaks the news to Melanie that she can no longer be friends with her, no one can blame her, as Melanie’s personality trended from kind and outgoing to invasive and creepy. In Toni Erdmann (2016), Ade’s audacious masterpiece, the irreverent Winfried (Peter Simonischek) takes on a new identity to pursue his estranged daughter Ines (Sandra Hüller), intent on securing her love with a repertoire of fake teeth, fabricated business expertise and an unforgettable Bulgarian animal costume.
Throughout her three feature films, Ade has refined and perfected a style that profiles, but doesn’t poke fun at the absurdities of human behavior and social etiquette. There’s humor and pathos, but sadness underlies these maddening fools who bulldoze through life, mistaking action for progress. Gitti is the consummate Ade subject, as her attempts to cure the communication breakdown with Chris descend from productive (talking about worries) to violent (threatening herself and others). After that initial dinner with Hans and Sana, Gitti begs Chris to tell her what he wants. Tell me, she says, I’ll be anything you want. That exact line might have been lifted from A Woman Under the Influence (1974), conjuring Gena Rowlands’ Mabel Longhetti, pleading to her husband Nick (Peter Falk), who’s openly embarrassed about how Mabel acted in front of his friends. Meanwhile, she was the one who just cooked them a spaghetti dinner for breakfast, entertaining them with song and dance.
Gitti’s vulnerability stems from the lack of control she has on this vacation and in the relationship. The fact that she’s staying at Chris’s parents house—for free—implies that she owes him loyalty, and submission to his needs. His personal and professional insecurities loom large, so he disregards Gitti’s attempted plans and instead couples up with Hans and Sana. The uneven power struggle frays Gitti’s nerves and patience, and the more time she has to spend with Hans and Sana, the closer she gets to a breaking point. The vacation becomes a zero-sum game, mirroring the dissolution of their partnership.
Ade has sympathy for Gitti here, just as she does for her other cinematic wild cards, Melanie and Winfriend/Toni. Similar to those two/three, Gitti is proactive and caring, but her expressions of love and outreach are met with hostility and judgment. So, she goes rogue. There, she shares a kinship with so many Fassbinder creations, fiercely independent personalities who respond with fury when the outside world imposes its monstrous, laughable expectations, categorizing those who don’t conform as weirdos unworthy of social consideration. Persistent rejection doesn’t defeat them, instead, it means war, and a once-playful struggle turns to a merciless battle for attention and love.
And while it’s not always easy to root for Gitti, or Fassbinder’s opportunistic Maria Braun or the cruel Petra von Kant, the portrayals of these characters is so deft, the surrounding narrative so layered, that the lengths to which they go is not a sign of instability, rather, it’s the only way they know how to defend themselves. They all endure hardships - for Maria Braun, it’s the death of her husband and child, for Petra, a tenuous relationship with her daughter and a mysterious new lover who threatens her livelihood - but never give up hope. Each impasse for Gitti builds a case for her to deploy extreme strategies to survive the vacation and determine if her relationship is still worth saving: leaping out the window, playing dead, threatening a guest with a knife. This all sounds unhinged on the page, but in the context of Gitti’s visible suffering, it’s almost understandable. And besides, it’s her holiday, too, damnit, shame on everyone else for trying to ruin it.
Similar to Cassavetes and fellow German Fassbinder, Ade offers more empathy to her characters than filmgoers, allowing no opportunity for viewers to look away. We’re all stuck there on that island, acting as both referee and participant in the struggles between Chris and Gitti. Ade turns the vacation setting into an enemy, just as Fassbinder favored vibrant colors and loud lighting in his BRD trilogy (Lola, The Marriage of Maria Braun and Veronika Voss), to juxtapose beautiful people and their ugly acts. Cassavetes’ sequences of marital discord and suburban misery in Faces (at the dinner table) or Husbands (at a bar) carried on longer than necessary to allow life partners and friends an excess of time (in the case of Husbands, the bar scene runs nearly 40 minutes) to inflict maximum damage on the surrounding party.
Citing two cinematic icons as touchstones for Ade’s film is a sign of admiration, but her subjects and their problems are wholly original, too real for fiction. And the conceit of Everyone Else—isolate dueling lovers on an island, watch them grow or diminish—conjures the lowbrow antithesis of European arthouse or American indie cinema: reality television. At least, the viewing experience sure is similar. To watch Gitti clench her lip when Chris admits to Hans and Sana (before telling Gitti) that he didn’t receive an architectural grant is to witness a slow-motion tumble, the type of unspoken discord we’re scared to laugh at for fear of pointing the finger at either of them. Gitti’s retribution won’t be poetic, it’ll be messy, like a New Jersey housewife flipping a table, or a share-house bro threatening to fuck up a bronzed, muscled rival.
This unwieldy mix of artistic influences is a high-wire act, requiring a collaborative effort from cast and crew to pull it off. Ade has a keen eye for talent, building a cohesive team to produce these bizarre, rewarding mash-ups. Löbau in Forest is likable and insufferable as the searching young teacher, and the father/daughter combination of the footloose Simonischek and steely Hüller are so convincing that it’s no surprise that they’d perform a flawless, impromptu rendition of Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All” to a roomful of strangers. The roles of Chris and Gitti are arguably more thankless and aggravating than any of Ade’s constructions, with Eidinger’s chilly, removed disposition shaken when he meets the unstoppable object that is Minichmayr’s intrepid Gitti. It can’t end well for them, but the one certainty is that it will end for them.
Ade’s people are just like the poor souls who can’t come up with a killer comeback in the moment, the folks who just wish they could’ve had that moment back. Next time, they’ll have something clever to say, instead of a petty insult. Next time, they won’t resort to physical violence against someone else, or themselves, to prove a point. The long view is impossible to take, so whatever it accomplishes short-term goals will do. Gitti , then, can brandish a knife at Sana—in response to her asking for a towel—forcing her to tell Hans that she’s sick and wants to leave. Instead of apologizing for shutting Gitti out, Chris just pulls up her shirt and blows a raspberry on her belly. Maybe he’s sorry, but he won’t utter those words; Gitti will just have to accept this endearing gesture and laugh it all off.
To take sides in any of Ade’s films would reduce them to the tropes that she aims to skewer: the happy couple, mutual agreements, peaceful reconciliation. Even sex, that sacred act, is part of the joke, too, in both Everyone Else and Toni Erdmann. In neither film is it cathartic or purely for pleasure: Ines memorably uses it to control a condescending male colleague, forcing him to masturbate on a petit four. And the most palpable display of physical connection between Chris and Gitti happens after Gitti’s lying on the ground, having jumped out the window. It’s slapstick humanism, Ade-style, no less bizarre and disorienting than the unsteady hijinks of a family vacation.
What’s so refreshing about this cinematic getaway is how original each conflict and resolution feels. Never had a pregnant woman’s request for a dry towel been met with a death threat, never had a woman who’d just plummeted several stories shared a passionate romp on the lawn with her boyfriend (who doesn’t bother to ask why she was lying there). The predictable vacation hurdles and tropes are shunned: logistical pratfails, a disrupted road trip, a honeymooning husband and wife reckoning with troubles in paradise. In fact, that Chris and Gitti aren’t married could help account for the widening gulf between them. The closest they come to an inseparable bond is when they’re watching Chris’s niece and nephew at the beginning. If none of the usual ties are binding them together—children, contractual vows—why do these two slug it out, instead of just cutting their losses?
Ade doesn’t purport to have an answer to that question, and it’s a stronger film for avoiding any simplistic (and unrealistic) solutions. Just before the credits roll, Gitti plays dead in the living room, and her phone rings. Chris picks it up, and tells her colleague that she’s at the beach. He hoists Gitti from the floor to the kitchen table, and blows on her stomach, jolting her awake. That bittersweet coda is a rare moment of relief, and there’s hope that text will pop up on screen explaining that these two lived happily ever after, that Chris is an award-winning architect and Gitti, a trailblazing music executive who has it all. That’s the reality TV version of the finale—tack on the customary freeze frames and smiling faces—not the fictional reality of this incendiary relationship. Leaving the island won’t solve their problems, just like going there in the first place was only bound to expose old wounds and open new ones.
Ade avoids broad strokes in her daring attempt to make a film that has no obvious agenda. Chris and Gitti are people, not prototypes representing their generation or relationships of a certain vintage. Their behavior may be outlandish at extremes—and hurtful to each other—but Ade isn’t out to villainize them. There are the delicate, serene moments: a picnic on a hike, spontaneous sex on the grass, which serve as reminders for how it could possibly work, when the pressure to conform yields to desire and relaxation. But, just like with reality TV—and a heightened Cassavetes or Fassbinder potboiler—conflict is too entertaining to evade (and calmness, all too fleeting), so Ade and her instruments of chaos soon revert to the mean, staying the course towards internal combustion.
Conforming to her own oddball, compassionate sensibilities, Ade delivered a universal vacation story that’s uncomfortably real for anyone who’s gone away with someone they love, yet grew to hate on that same trip. Chris and Gitti won’t be able to figure it out, and there will be no sequel. At least they got a free vacation in exchange for their suffering. In the closing scene, Chris appears ready to hold a vigil for Gitti and their relationship, beside her listless corpse. Instead, he leaves her laughing, breathing, bringing her back to life. Now that the vacation is over, the honeymoon phase can start. Ade’s not the one to build that imaginary world, it’d be too much of a stretch to develop such a fantasy.
Kevin Parks is a freelance writer and film critic who regularly contributes to The Movie Buff. He lives in Manhattan with his partner, their daughter and dog.