An exercise in voyeurism, Maren Ade's provocatively titled, superbly performed, emotionally graphic Everyone Else is more fascinating than enjoyable. Placing a youngish, newly formed couple under relentless observation, Ade's two-hour squirmathon gets a bit more intimate on the subject of intimacy than the viewer might wish.
Chris (Lars Eidinger), an underemployed architect, and Gitti (Birgit Minichmayr), a middling music-industry publicist (for a band called the Shames, no less), take a week to culture their relationship in the petri dish of his parents' haute-bourgeois, kitsch-stuffed Sardinian villa.
Everyone Else is concentrated enough to become experiential. Ade's exploration of intimacy and its discontents recalls the European relationship epics of 35 years ago Rivette's L'amour fou, Bergman's Scenes From a Marriage, Jean Eustache's The Mother and the Whore but it's purposefully down-sized and set in a lower key. Ade has an acute sense of gesture. The tumult ends with a simple request that more or less recaps the entire movie: Chris asks Gitti only to look at him.
Wed., July 7, 9:10 p.m., 2010