Bracher: ‘Everything everywhere…’ took me out of my time – 04/15/2023 – Candido Bracher

A chronicle by Rubem Braga that many of my generation read at school tells how a baker learned that he was nobody: “Many times it happened that he rang the doorbell of a house and was answered by a maid or any other person, and heard a voice that came from inside asking who it was; and hearing the person who had answered him say inside: ‘it’s nobody, ma’am, it’s the baker'”.

Life often has this unceremonious way of giving us hard news. The most recent one I got came from newspaper headlines reporting that “Everything Everywhere at Once” had been the big Oscar winner. It was as if they told me that I was becoming a “nobody”, someone incapable of understanding his time.

I explain. A few months earlier, as soon as the film became available for international streaming, I received an enthusiastic message from my 34-year-old son, saying that he had seen the night before what would undoubtedly be the best film of the year.

In the evening, my wife and I sit in front of the television, already anticipating the pleasure of watching a great movie. A few moments later, we were wondering if our son was making fun of his parents. How could he possibly believe that we would like that? A visual chaos, where scenes full of elements that seem to have come out of a cheap bazaar alternate at great speed, accompanied by strident and often incomprehensible dialogues and a nexus that —even when paying close attention— insists on trying to escape, forcing an exhaustive chase .

After an hour or so, we broke up and turned off the television. I decided to attribute my son’s recommendation to a very intellectual approach reinforced by film school, his fascination with modern oriental culture and video games, and a certain exoticism that youth tends to cultivate. I was pacified by this rationalization and forgot about it.

This peace lasted until the announcement of the Oscars. Not that I attribute to the Academy the ability to effectively point out the best that cinema has produced in a given year; many bad films have been award winners and some great ones have been left out. Even so, it cannot be ignored that recognition at least reflects the sympathy of most people.

I asked myself how is it possible to be so out of tune with today’s world? I was still tempted to seek solace in an article in O Globo, where the headline by journalist Ruth de Aquino said that this was the worst film I had ever seen until the end. But, reading the article, I realized that his motives were much more elaborate than those I would have been able to formulate, with the limited understanding I had had of the film. What’s more, whenever I think of comforting myself by meeting colleagues in misfortune, I remember the phrase that a co-worker used to quote: “Mal de muchos, consuelo de tontos.”

To paraphrase the great Vanzolini, “Like Churchill, I tried again.” I invited my children and a godson for sushi in front of the television and a talk after the movie. I tried to keep my attention focused, resisting the habit I’d recently developed of glancing at my cell phone from time to time. It occurred to me that the habit corresponds precisely to the impulse to do everything at the same time, contained in the message of the film.

On the first attempt to watch the film, one of the few things I had apprehended was the coexistence of parallel universes, each of them corresponding to the path that life would have followed according to the decision that had been taken in each of its many critical instances. Not only do these universes go their separate ways, some characters are able to migrate between them as they wish.

When thinking about this idea, it is impossible not to feel its power of seduction. Can you imagine how less difficult the options in life would be if we didn’t have to give up anything? If the alternative neglected on a given occasion could be resumed later on, in case the original choice did not satisfy us? Irresistible, isn’t it?

If the hypothesis is tempting for someone who has already made a good part of the difficult choices in life and who, with greater or lesser pain, reconciled with the renunciations implicit in them, imagine it for young people who still have so many critical crossroads ahead of them.

It is here that the film surprises. It’s like telling us: “Be careful what you wish for”. Through hyperbolic visual language, scenes of explicit bad taste and a combination of cheesy with intelligence and humor, the film leads us to ask the question: if we can simply change universes, what value does life have?

We are left with the message that this value resides in the commitments we make, in the affections we choose and in the persistent search for understanding the other through empathy. And so we avoid the infinite void of insignificant relationships, of everything that becomes nothing, represented in the film by a huge black donut (associated with Schwarzschild’s black hole, in a review I read).

Upon finishing the film, I cannot deny that watching it has been painful for me at different times, that it has often seemed confusing, exaggerated and longer than necessary. I felt that it was like hearing a beautiful story in a language that was harsh to my ears and that I didn’t quite understand. But languages ​​are there for us to learn and, as long as we feel like it, we can always count on movies and children to help us.

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