From time to time, it happens that a film throws us to the ground. Both existential reflection and cosmic farce, Everything Everywhere All at Once (Everything everywhere all at once) is one of those rare cinematic shocks.
We follow Evelyn, who undergoes the worst day of her life, between a disapproving father visiting, a husband who wants a divorce and a daughter she does not understand. All of this hassle culminates as a Revenue Agency official looks into the finances of the couple’s laundry room. Then, here Evelyn learns that she actually leads a myriad of different lives in parallel universes. However, this “multiverse” is threatened, unless Evelyn intervenes.
The title Everything Everywhere All at Once could not be more appropriate as the action, the places, and above all the ideas, abound there. Looks like a cross between The Matrix (The matrix) and Being John Malkovich (Inside John Malkovich’s Head), thousandth power. In an interview, Dan Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, the screenwriters and directors who work under the nickname “The Daniels”, make no secret of their influences in this case.
“Several years ago, I attended a screening where The Matrix and fight club were shown as a doubleheader, and I was amazed at how daring and cerebral the films of the late 1990s were. When I got home, I said to myself that Daniel and I should design our own version of these films,” explains Dan Kwan.
One of the countless subversive finds ofEverything Everywhere All at Once is that Evelyn is the antithesis of the traditional figure of the chosen one. If she’s the only one able to save all the other Evelyns from certain destruction, that’s by default. In that his life is so insignificant that it is only untapped potential.
At the bend of lightning trips in lives where she is sometimes the star of action films, a singer or a physicist, Evelyn accumulates knowledge and skills that allow her to carry out her unusual mission. To continue Dan Kwan:
“This bias allowed us to develop insane action scenes. But above all, we realized that it opened the door to all sorts of existential considerations like “Who am I? What is my place in the universe? What have I done with my life? etc. This dichotomy between frenetic action and existential reflection excited us a lot. »
The Lives of Michelle Yeoh
Originally, the Daniels envisioned not one, but one protagonist, who could have been played by Jackie Chan. Michelle Yeoh was already saying that part of the equation. “We dreamed of working with her, recalls Daniel Scheinert. We had thought of her for the role of the wife, then gradually, the project was transformed, and as soon as we reversed the roles of the spouses and made the woman the protagonist, everything suddenly fit together perfectly. »
“It was getting more interesting,” adds Dan Kwan. And very quickly, we were inspired by our mothers, our aunts: very strong, very inspiring women. To a good extent, the film pays homage to them. »
Daniel Scheinert continues: “More precisely, an immigrant woman who tries to disentangle herself between the values of her father’s generation and those of her daughter’s generation, and who is looking for herself, and who is overworked, all the time, seemed to us the most improbable candidate as a superheroine of a multiverse. »
Upon reading the script, the star of tiger and dragon remained perplexed, if only because of the schoolboy humor that often reaches surreal heights. Then, after seeing Swiss Army Manthe previous film of the duo in which Daniel Radcliffe plays a corpse serving for a moment as a raft propelled by its own flatulence (yes, yes), Michelle Yeoh understood that she was dealing with two originals.
Former Miss Malaysia, Michelle Yeoh was destined for a career as a ballerina. Following an injury, she had to reorient herself to acting. It was a bit of a coincidence that she became Hong Kong’s first female action movie star during the 1980s-1990s before a role in 007 Tomorrow Never Dies(tomorrow never dies) opens the doors of Hollywood to him. In the light of her career, there is a form of poetry in seeing her play this character which hides dozens of others.
“Once on board, Michelle had an impossible time of pleasure, even if she sometimes wondered what kind of madness she had gotten herself into,” recalls Daniel Scheinert, laughing.
On this point, the presence of a “deglamorized” Jamie Lee Curtis ready for all sorts of eccentricities helped a lot.
“Having a star like Jamie Lee take on a supporting role in our film was amazing. But in addition, she accepted with real happiness all the bizarre proposals that we submitted to her. That she immediately showed us this absolute confidence was extraordinary, because everyone was waiting a bit to see her reaction,” explains Daniel Scheinert.
What do we mean by “weird proposals”? Playing with hot dogs instead of fingers during a segment that is both hilarious and poignant, or watching a fight between Evelyn and two assailants sporting conspicuous “ butt plugs “.
In this regard, like the multiverse with infinite ramifications that we discover at the same time as Evelyn, the Daniels’ cheek in terms of humor seems to know no bounds. “Our barometer is our parents,” says Dan Kwan. If we think they’ll be embarrassed because of something like that, we take it out. »
The seat of magic
In the film, the breaks in tone and the overlapping of genres are legion. “In addition to our previous feature film, we have made a lot of music videos and short films in which we have developed this voice of our own; this tension between the hilarious and the poignant as you said earlier. For us, that’s where the magic happens,” says Daniel Scheinert.
“We find this kind of tonal shift in the anime, but also in South Korean cinema: their cinematographic history is more recent than that of Hollywood, and the filmmakers there are less reverent than their American colleagues can be. That too inspires us,” notes Dan Kwan.
One of the most striking aspects of the film, considering its fragmented dimension, is its remarkable cohesion. Which cohesion is based on a clear vision established during the writing and staging stages, but also during the editing, as Daniel Scheinert points out. “During editing, relying more on our instincts than on logic sometimes leads to excellent surprises. »
The resulting film is definitely one.
Everything Everywhere All at Once hits theaters April 8.