At the start of Every You Every Me, a lady arrives at a workplace to coax her husband out of a locked room. He has a job interview pending but a long-running panic attack in tense situations has led to a crisis; that’s why he has locked himself in the room. His wife climbs over a barrier to get to him and finds that he’s an animal, a bovine. She pets him lovingly and he transforms into a boy.
“I’m so sorry,” Paul says.
“You don’t have to be,” Nadine replies.
This is how Michael Fetter Nathansky introduces his leads in this ultra-sensitive portrait of a marriage on the verge of collapse or reinvention. The story’s relatability and the terrific performance of the leads will make this a staple for film programmers, while careful marketing should bring in adult audiences who might find something of themselves in Paul or Nadine.
After he survives the panic attack, Paul (Carlo Ljubek) insists on apologising to the boss of this workplace directly. Only as he waits with his wife does he become a man. But the interview opportunity has been spurned. He insists on another chance. Nadine insists. She is having problems at her own office. Their family needs Paul to get this job.
“If he fought like you, maybe I’d reconsider,” the boss says to Nadine.
This exchange is a commentary on how the couple is perceived by outsiders: Nadine is trustworthy, adult; Paul is quite the opposite. On the other hand, Paul’s visual transformations are a representation of how his wife sees him: a boy, an animal, a stranger. Unfortunately, both perceptions are contiguous, a detail hinted at in Nathansky’s title in English. ‘Every You’ loves ‘Every Me’ is a charitable interpretation. But the title also contains a small threat: What if Every You fell in love with a Particular Me and all of the other versions only recall some nonexistent ideal? Would this be a problem for a relationship?
To provide a fuller context of their current circumstances, Nathansky, who’s also responsible for the screenplay, takes us back in time. Paul and Nadine once fought at their workplace. At a party that takes place later, some kind of affection develops after Paul shares a rather creepy story about wanting to kiss her father. In that scene, as Paul speaks about his father’s death to this lady he once fought with, he is alternately a young man and a beautiful blond boy. These transformations seem to tell us something about the nature of the initial sparks of romance and what happens later. Youth and loveliness may spur attraction; what happens after years go by, in the presence of children and work pressures, is a different tale.
It is perhaps not fair to Paul that that tale is told through Nadine’s eyes. But if stories of these sort are inevitably skewered in one person’s favour, there can be no doubt that Nathansky found a preternaturally capable actress in Aenne Schwarz. A regular Debbie Downer even before her troubled marriage and work, Nadine is quite a character. Schwarz nails her with just the right amount of sourness. She gets a proper assist from a knowing script that supplies her with brutal barbs that may sound familiar to anyone who has dished or received a verbal attack spawned by frustration. In one scene, Nadine tells Paul that he stinks. What of, he inquires good-naturedly. Of you, she says as though she has only just understood that this man she has lived with for years has an unpleasant smell.
Schwarz is excellent at conveying the pressures of work, marriage, life. She’s especially great at signalling the deterioration of love: the resentment, the off-hand cruelty, the brusque malice, the dearth of desire.
Of course, there is a suspenseful inevitability built into this deeply cutting domestic drama. Surely, this can’t go on forever, right? Will they stay together? And if they don’t, how will the end come? If they do, why, given what the audience knows? A climactic precursor to the answers for our twin avatars of de-romance comes beside a pool at night, a placid cover for a scene brimming with roiling emotions.
In examining marriage, Nathansky’s film, which premiered at the 2024 Berlinale, recalls the theme — and one oral sex scene — of Derek Cianfrance’s 2010 Sundance bow, Blue Valentine. He has added a surreal, thoughtful work-sensitive entry into the contemporary corpus of stories about love, lovers, and their limitations. Contributions from production designer Jonathan Saal and cinematographer Jan Mayntz provide a spare realist balance to the story’s surreal elements.
Director, screenwriter: Michael Fetter Nathansky
Cast: Aenne Schwarz, Carlo Ljubek, Youness Aabbaz, Sara Fazilat, Jule Nebel-Linnenbaum, Sammy Schrein, Naila Schuberth, Skyla Theissen, Alexandra Huber
Producers: Virginia Martin, Michael Fetter Nathansky, Lucas Schmidt, Lasse Scharpen, Maren Schmitt, Wolfgang Cimera
Production design: Jonathan Saal
Costume design: Julia Kneusels
Music: Ben Winkler, Gregor Keienburg
Sound Design: Stefan Kolleck
Production companies: Contando Films and Studio Zentral/Network production
Co-production: ZDF – Das kleine Fernsehspiel, Nephilim Producciones
World sales: Be For Films
Venue: Berlinale (Panorama)
In 107 minutes
