And ends up occupying a large part of my heart too, with its story of overcoming grief by bringing about the impossible.
There are lots of ifs and maybes in Sandra Wollner’s film, particularly in the second half of it. Much like the mantra those of us who have left our homelands often repeat, in secret and in the quiet recesses of our minds, that you “can’t go home again,” Everytime poses the question of whether or not loss is final.
I’m reminded of a question I posed a couple of years to French mega star Isabelle Huppert, who does not feature in the Austrian-born, Berlin-based helmer’s Un Certain Regard top winning film. I sat down with her in Marrakech and blurted out “do you believe in ghosts?” For the answer, and her quick wits you will have to search for that piece, but let’s just say that the idea feels appropriate watching Wollner’s film, and had I gotten a chance to interview her before I left the Croisette (even before the film screened, alas) I would have kicked off with that question again.
While I watched Everytime I kept asking my body and intellect to disbelieve, in the sense that I wanted to separate myself from my usual practical thinking and follow the yellow brick road that Wollner had placed before me. It was a much brighter, much happier path than the actual logical story which Everytime presented and I love finding new ways to deal with grief. I have so much of it in my own life, as I’m sure everyone does.
At the start of the film, the teenager Jessie (Carla Hüttermann) defies her mom Ella’s wishes and goes out raving with her teenage boyfriend Lux (Tristán López), before an early departure for the family including little sister Melli, to a holiday in Tenerife. With a mix of drugs in her young body, that defiance becomes a series of choices that change all their lives forever and creates a long lasting journey of pain instead of a joyful time away spent among loved ones on vacation, as planned. But teenagers often make the wrong choice and how many times I could have been Jessie myself when I was 16 or 17. How many of us drank from the wrong glass, tried the wrong thing and hung out with the wrong crowd as kids — it’s a normal rite of passage that doesn’t always lead to tragedy.
When Ella (Austrian acting super woman Birgit Minichmayr) and Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling) are left to deal with the aftermath, they seem at first to survive. Surviving is an awful word, because to me it entails barely keeping one’s head above water. It is not living at all, it’s just a manner to keep going without any pleasure or pain, and without any fun at all.
Then Lux comes back from a trip to the US, probably sent there by his parents to deal with his own survivor’s guilt and triggers a new path to pain, yet one that could perhaps help save the family. Ella doesn’t want to blame him, but secretly couldn’t possibly not, and Lux doesn’t want to feel off the hook, yet probably secretly does. One day, Ella asks to try the mix of drugs that sent Jessie over the edge, literally and walks her daughter’s same path, to try and understand.
When that only brings about a cathartic grief, Ella takes everyone, Melli and Lux that is, to in Tenerife, to make up for the holiday that never was. It is there that Melli finds Lux’s backpack and tries a “candy” which isn’t what it seems, but spits it out almost immediately to replace it with the chewing gum she wanted all along. At her young age, Melli can’t be more than 8 years old, the drugs kick in and she begins to see images of her older sister as a 3 year old. The remainder of the story you’ll have to decode for yourself but it’s obvious to the viewer that this is a tragedy dressed in tranquil ending clothing and perhaps what the jury saw was its unique ability to allow us to deal with trauma, by imagining it is shades of the metaphysical.
“I don’t believe in an afterlife, but I envy those who do,” writes in the press kit the filmmaker, “I do believe that the images of the people we love stay with us - that they somehow inscribe themselves into the world. Ever since my father died, whenever I come across a certain bend in the river, I can see him standing there, fiddling with his fishing rod. And for a brief instant it feels as if I could simply step into that image.” And that’s the superpower of Everytime, its ability to allow us to imagine those we loved and lost in our lives again, never having changed and never having gone away.
The film benefits from UK cinematographer Gregory Oke’s work and Hannes Bruun’s editing, but also the courageous silence vs. noise choices of original sound designer Johannes Schmelzer-Ziringer. It is sold in Cannes by Charades.
Image courtesy of the Festival de Cannes, used with permission.