I love "Everyone"

No Comments

• Scott Nye says:

  May 16, 2010 at 1:46 pm

  Caught this at the Portland International Film Festival, and have been eager to dive back in to get a bet­ter sense of the struc­ture, which like you said, really does sneak up on you. Without giv­ing too much away, I was par­tic­u­larly blown away with how the struc­tur­al concept of the end­ing, and how it tied back into the opening.
  Okay, some vague, them­at­ic, styl­ist­ic spoilers…
  Basically, I loved that it ended as it opened – the open­ing threw us head first into an exact moment, and the end­ing cut away from an exact moment, rather than either tak­ing place at the begin­ning or end of a scene, respect­ively. This is what I wrote after see­ing it:
  “This isn’t simply a styl­ist­ic decision or one arrived upon simply because the easi­est way to start a movie is to pick up in the middle of a scene. There are, wait for it…thematic rami­fic­a­tions to the way Ade starts and ends her film. For these char­ac­ters, the past seems to grow more and more dis­tant every day, and the con­nec­tions it has to their present state seem increas­ingly tenu­ous – they’re as unsure about how they arrived to this part of their lives as we are. Similarly, the future is always unknow­able, a truth that nev­er seems more imme­di­ate than when one is in a troubled rela­tion­ship. Every second is filled with the pos­sib­il­ity that your life, and espe­cially the plans you made for the future, could change or van­ish alto­geth­er. Thus, the begin­ning and end of the film are not simply mys­ter­i­ous, they define the whole exper­i­ence – Chris and Gitti’s, any couple’s, ours as an audi­ence. What seems cas­u­al is actu­ally a pro­foundly bold choice.”