Like a lot of other critics, I'm a big admirer of Maren Ade's film Everyone Else. (Above is a still from a particularly, um, fraught scene in the picture; that's Birgit Minichmayr with the knife, and Nicole Marischka without.) I spoke to Ade and to my friend Kent Jones about the film, and the director, for a piece in the Los Angeles Times, which you can read here.
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.”