This Week at the Movies: Every You Every Me

Michael Fetter Nathansky's multi-award-winning debut "You Tell Me" is a nuanced account of relationships and the influence of emotions on perception. His second feature film "Every You Every Me" is also about how emotions shape our view of other people: Nadine, brilliantly played by Aenne Schwarz, leaves her home in Brandenburg to take up a job as a mechanical engineer in a factory in Cologne. There she falls in love with her colleague Paul (Carlo Ljubek), who seems so multifaceted to her that she perceives him in a wide variety of guises - which the film translates into surreal and yet completely plausible scenes in which Paul sometimes appears as a child, sometimes as an older woman or even as a cow. But a few years later, this magic seems to have faded. Everyday life and routine have dulled the relationship as well as Nadine's perception, and while the factory is also in a state of crisis and redundancies are looming, she panics that her love is going to the dogs. But Nadine doesn't want to give up here or there without a fight... With a virtuoso interweaving of different time levels, "Every You Every Me" manages a touching balancing act between realism and the dreamlike. Nathansky tells the story of the working-class milieu just as credibly and nuanced as the love affair.