Reverberation usually describes the phenomenon of a reflected and delayed sound impulse that, attenuated to the perceiving ear, has diverted into different manifestations from its original impulse. At first sight, one may be tempted to describe the cinema of Sandra Wollner as densely populated with motivic reverberation. Think of the image of a body floating in the water that repeats in the Austrian’s three films thus far. But already in her debut, The Impossible Picture (2016) — which, like the following The Trouble With Being Born (2020), she realized during her studies at Baden-Württemberg’s Film Academy in Germany — the stability of an origin proper is outright shattered. Not only in terms of the project itself, which was born from a chance find of old family slides at a flea market and the wish to re-create (“impossible”) glimpses into a strange-yet-familiar Austrian family in the late 1950s in the form of Cinéma direct, but also within the narrative, when the youngest daughter appears to recognize a boy by name in an old photograph that predates her own birth. Toward the end of the film, when the same girl takes on the voiceover narration, the viewer learns that the family’s most recent offspring is given the name of that very boy. Beginnings and ends, in Wollner’s films, mark existential tenets only insofar as they are poised to collapse.
Given the critical success of her two previous outings, it wasn’t exactly shocking to see Everytime, Wollner’s newest film, appear in the official selection at this year’s Cannes (though, especially in light of the amply noted quality drought of competition titles, its placement in Un Certain Regard may feel like a lapse in judgment by the programmers). Even so, the force with which Everytime advances Wollner’s project into unprecedented heights is undeniable. Many commentators have already remarked upon its parallels to Aftersun, citing cinematographer Gregory Oke and the holiday setting of a European beach resort as obvious connective tissue. In keeping with the Wollnerian logics, these comparisons prove more complicated, for doesn’t The Impossible Picture already contain an adolescent daughter who, faced with the loss of her father, resorts to her camera that, however consciously, bridges the gap between the living and the dead? Similarly, last year’s Sound of Falling, to whose director Mascha Schilinski Wollner pays gratitude in the end credits of Everytime, exhibits many of the trademarks of Wollner’s debut — a vérité-style camera set in a decades-distant past, naturalist dialogues, an extended family, and a focus on different generations of women in a patriarchal society. Perhaps one best stays away from questions of origins.
An explanation or resolution is rarely as compelling as the flickering between, Wollner said in an interview from years ago. Looking at her approach to narrative in Everytime, it wouldn’t altogether seem that things have changed on that front. Thrust into a coming-of-age story, the viewer swiftly finds themselves embroiled in the unfolding of an anticlimactic narrative triptych whose motivic structure, punctuated by a number of recurring anomalies, insists on some diffuse sense of existential circularity. If all this sounds obscure or unnecessarily abstract, rest assured that Everytime is far from a cerebral exercise; it may, in fact, mark Wollner’s most accessible film to date, encapsulating a family’s loss, the subsequent mourning and remorse, and their unlikely and transitory re-forming. Still, there appears to be a deep aversion toward conventional dramaturgy, going so far even as to manifest in the customary end credits’ disclaimer asserting that every semblance to real life — of its characters, of its events — be coincidental. Rather than a “film” — let alone a story — Everytime is here merely (or majorly?) called a “space.”
Even so, there is a neatness to Everytime that Wollner’s previous efforts did not betray, conspicuous from the very first shot. There, with an Antonioni-like patience, the camera, with some distance atop an overpass, picks up a family at the platform of a Berlin S-Bahn station: mother Ella (played by the great Birgit Minichmayr, immortalized ever since her performance in Maren Ade’s Everyone Else), her oldest daughter Jessie (Carla Hüttermann), and Melli, the youngest (Lotte Keiling). As they mount the stairs, the viewer briefly loses sight of them before finally meeting them on eye-level and seeing them off through the tunnel. It’s a movement of pull and push, suggestive both of the tensile forces that draw the characters our way and the ease with which they may go amiss. Soon enough, still in the first part of Wollner’s triptych, Gregory Oke delivers the most potent shot of the film (and likely one of this year’s finest), a sequence as riveting as it is dizzying. Against a cloudless sky, the sunrise casts the tops of the otherwise indecorous high-rise GDR apartment blocks around Berlin’s Alexanderplatz in warm ember. As the camera zooms slowly onto one of their roofs, two adolescents are eventually brought into relief. One of whom holds up their phone camera to trace a random bird, an impulse to which the direction seemingly yields. Yet as the camera turns away from the teenagers, the boundaries between extradiegetic and intradiegetic perspective seemingly collapse into paradoxicality, not altogether different from The Impossible Picture, in which the protagonist Johanna figures both as the one filming and the filmed.
From this moment onward, things are different in the life of mother Ella and her little family, who, in the aftermath of a shattering event, form an unhoped-for fictive kinship — that which German speakers commonly call Schicksalsgemeinschaft — with Jessie’s boyfriend Lux (Tristán López). There is a rarely achieved sagacity to the way in which Wollner subsequently explores the inner and outer workings of grief: how it manifests in action and inaction, how it overtaxes people’s capacity to comfort others, how the digital age has created its own kind of intimacies. (As to the manner in which Wollner understands how we emotionally attach to smartphones for their capacity to archive the voices of our loved ones, and how a broken phone may well amount to a “second spiritual death,” there are almost eerie resonances with Ben Lerner’s Transcription, which was published just a month prior to Everytime’s world premiere in Cannes’ Salle Debussy.) If the film circumvents the many conceivable clichés that often undermine the affective potential of films centered on grief, it is not incidental. In the director’s statement, Wollner names the passing of her father as an incisive influence on the film.
With the many visual qualities highlighted so far — many more of which could be cited: a condom picked out of a candy jar that reveals the intimate secrets between a love that has come to an end; the glitchy Minecraft landscapes that have the player fall through its grid into an unknown — a barely programmed — abyss; and, of course, the aerial flare that an otherwise unknown girl on Tenerife, the Canary island to which the makeshift family flies (or flees?) in the film’s second half, shoots into the sun, mysteriously suspending its sunset. And there are other qualities still, more easily missed, especially to non-German-speaking audiences. In contrast to the artful and often painful dialogue crafted by Angela Schanelec (to whom, curiously, both Guy Lodge in Variety and Jordan Mintzer in The Hollywood Reporter draw parallels) or the forthright artificial dialogue of Christian Petzold, Wollner’s scripts have always been highly naturalistic (less so, purposefully, in The Trouble With Being Born, at least as far as the incestuous relationship between the father and his android daughter was concerned). In Everytime, the world once again feels truly inhabited.
And yet, if there is, in spite of itself — that is, in spite of its many instances of foreshadowing and motivic reverberance (that later turn out to be dispersion) — an unprecedented neatness to Everytime, it derives from the manner in which the individual image is functionalized in service of the conveyance of meaning. So determined is Wollner on exhibiting the instability of the inner logics of her fiction that some of these ambitions simply fall flat, seem arbitrary: take the poster hanging on the door of the sister’s shared room on which the camera meaningfully lingers for too long and which reads “Horror Vacui.” Once the family has set foot on Tenerife, where an encounter, impossible by any ordinary account, takes place, the youngest daughter Melli, all alone, finds herself traversing the thoroughly abandoned — not to say “empty” — grounds of the Canarian holiday resort. By this point, the film has already hinted at the family’s travels (which were initially scheduled for the previous summer, before the great familial — as well as narrative — disruption). In one scene, we saw Melli in an indoor water park near Berlin; in another, DV footage provided glimpses into a family holiday of yore, foreshadowing a lighthouse that — granted — appears in the final minutes of the film. Seemingly inexhaustible in number, these instances become increasingly oppressive, though, evidently, only after the fact. Perhaps counterintuitively, the individual image, burdened with the assignment to mean, forecloses meaning.
Comments are closed.