52 Films by Women Vol 10. 45. EVERYTIME (Director: Sandra Wollner)
Pictured: Lamenting the absence of a beach in Berlin, classmates Lux (Tristán López, left) and Jessie (Carla Hütterman, right) in an anxiety-inducing rooftop scene featured in Austrian writer-director Sandra Wollner's third feature, 'Everytime'. Still courtesy of Charades Film Sales (France)
Early in Austrian writer-director Sandra Wollner’s third feature, Everytime, a study
of grief and regret, there is a sequence featuring two young people on top of a
tall building in Berlin that makes the audience anxious. We hear their
conversation as the camera zooms in, as if mounted in an adjacent building. The
couple in question are teenager Jessie (Carla Hütterman), who shares her
bedroom with her ten-year-old sister Melli (Lotte Shirin Keiling) – a point of
contention in the film’s opening scenes – and Lux (Tristán López), a classmate
who requires help with his maths homework. The pair are looking at the sky and
lamenting that Berlin doesn’t have a beach. ‘We have Wannsee lake,’ Jessie
counters before getting up and starting to photograph Lux, walking backwards to
reframe him. The camera moves to follow a bird that passes overhead, then
suddenly lurches downward as if tracking a falling object, eventually focussing
on the greenery on the ground below. We something that is red, an article of
clothing or perhaps a vehicle. The focus isn’t perfect. The grain of the image
– Everytime is shot on film – also contributes to the
ambiguity.
By the next scene,
it is clear that Jessie – born 2007, died 18 July 2024 – fell. Her mother Ella
(Birgit Minichmayr) tends to her grave whilst on the phone. Wollner doesn’t
focus directly on her emotions, nor those of young Melli. The family planned a
trip to Tenerife prior to Jessie’s death. The family had visited the resort
when she was just able to walk. Jessie’s first memory is standing on a balcony
with a man, but she doesn’t remember who he was. We suspect it was her father,
Ella’s ex-husband, in whose garden a meal is held after her death. Lux is also
present, traumatised but not yet able to leave the orbit of Jessie’s family. He
asks to visit the grave. Ella agrees. Melli is keen for him to fix her late
sister’s computer, on which a video game continues to glitch (I understand it
is Minecraft, but I couldn’t identify it myself). There are a number of point-of-view
sequences of the video game being played (we see the screen but not who is
playing). The game appears to mirror Jessie’s apparent fall into the abyss.
Lux’s trauma is
indicated in a scene in which he kicks the legs of a chair of a friend who is
goading him. There is the question of whether his spending time with the much
younger Melli is appropriate. For her part, in her father’s house, Melli
watches videos of her sister as an infant. The handy-cam footage follows young
Jessie, who at one point is shown sitting in front of a flashing fire engine,
cooing appreciatively, or at least suitably diverted. Melli also re-reads her
text conversations with her late sister, maintaining a connection of sorts with
her sibling.
To coincide with
Jessie’s birthday and to assist Lux with his grief, Ella, Melli and Lux go on
holiday together. At this point, some way into the film, events take a less
naturalistic turn. For starters, Melli sends her sister a message ‘Happy
Birthday’ written in English, followed by a cake emoji, and then appears to be
receiving a reply – we see the three dots indicating that someone is typing.
Then Melli’s grandmother calls. Melli hands the phone to her mother, who then
drops it. Melli never explains that her dead sister appeared to be trying to
contact her. She sulks. Ella tells her, ‘it is just a phone’. Lux is keen to
return to Berlin and Ella identifies a direct flight for the next day, but
Melli wants to stay. Outside the hotel, having already been told off by her
mother for eating junk food, Melli buys a tin of orange drink from a vending
machine and discovers a toddler sitting in front of a flashing fire engine. The
coincidence is disturbing. Then Ella spots the infant and comes to the same
conclusion; that the child is Jessie as an infant.
What happens next is
what I would broadly describe as one of the most tense and uncomfortable thirty
minutes I have ever spent in a cinema, the realist aesthetic established early
on putting the audience on edge. Melli discovers that there are no adults
present – none; the explanation is that Melli becomes distressed while
Spaniards are on their Siesta (taking a nap). She searches for the infant and
goes swimming in the sea, trying to attract the attention of a group of Spanish
children who have discovered a flare gun. One of the children, Ria runs off
with the gun and fires it. We watch the flare cross the sky, as if dividing the
setting sun in two, then explode. No adults see it. Melli is in very real
danger in the water and in a film in which one sister has died, we fear the
worst.
There appears to be
two children missing, a toddler and a young girl. Having been located by Ella
and Lux, who have the infant with them, Melli runs to watch a boat being
launched. No one appears to claim the toddler in a Tenerife T-Shirt (orange
lettering on white). The ending is completely surprising, though by this point,
the glitch on Jessie’s computer appears to be reflected in reality. A square
sun refuses to set, even when it is 11:30pm.
Wollner makes use of
doubling. Not just the two sausages served to Lux during a meal (‘Bratwurst or
Bratwurst’) but a scene at a station that opens the film – Melli arguing with
her sister – is mirrored by another at the same location at which Ella sees Lux
sitting alone and crying. A scene in which the trio are knocked over by a wave
while in their Tenerife hotel compound provides the seed of our unsettled
response to Melli being in the water on her own.
Is the ending of the
film logical? Wollner suggests that at extreme moments, people choose to live
in a reality of their own making. A voiceover tells us that Lux lost contact
with the family, that Melli saw him at a station but didn’t feel comfortable waving
to him. Comparisons have been made between Everytime and
Charlotte Wells’ film, Aftersun, another film about grief and set during a
foreign holiday (in Turkey rather than Spain). The films share the same
cinematographer, Gregory Oke. But Aftersun’s twist depends upon the child reevaluating
the experience – there is a lurch forward to the present. Everytime is concerned with a state of mind that is
alleviated by an incredible assumption, a belief in reincarnation. Wollner’s
film is less a tear-jerker than a ‘what the heck was that?’
Reviewed at Screen
Three, Picturehouse Central, Wednesday 14 October 2026, 12:00 midday, London
Film Festival Press & Industry Screening
Comments
Post a Comment