This is not going to be an ordinary film review.

The purpose of this website is to disrupt the assumption of mainstream film criticism, which presupposes that a film can be “good” or “bad”. Instead, the aim is to focus on – to paraphrase Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari’s remark about bodies – what a film can do.¹ The ultimate goal of DasieisMovies is to acknowledge that a critic, a writer, always speaks from a particular position, but we also attempt to avoid the trap of infusing a text with an identity – to trade singular “I” to “we”. The plural form is a method for a critic to become one with a film, with text and a reader. This way the lines between subject and object blur. 

There are, however, circumstances in a writer’s life when “we” cannot be reached because “I” experiences an event so overwhelming, so painful, that it needs to speak its own truth. “I” in this context is the ego that suffers a loss so unimaginable that it is being dismantled without the need for artistic, aesthetic expression. This is the case for the female protagonist of The Sky is Everywhere, Lennie (Grace Kaufman), who navigates through the grief caused by the death of her sister, Bailey (Havana Rose Liu). 

This is also my own current condition, although nobody close to me died this literal Death. The person I lost forever is still out there, living (hopefully) their best life, just not with me. Their decision to leave me and to never look back shook my existence to its foundations, burying my dreams and hopes for the future, locking me up in the past and unable to fully be in the present. This is why this cannot be an ordinary film review: Lennie’s experience and my own are too entangled to allow me to talk about the film without my ”I”. I need to speak in this singular form because in every moment of my day and night, this “I” collapses, and the darkness engulfs me to such a degree that I become a jarring void. I lose my balance, unable to navigate through a society that requires some stability, and some identity in order to survive, to function. 

The Sky is Everywhere directed by Josephine Decker is not a perfect film, it is not an example of pure, excellent cinema. But what do those terms mean anyway? We could get into great debates on politics of taste but this is not the purpose of this article. For someone like myself, who has not been able to move on after the loss of her love, trying desperately to linger into remnants of their scent in my clothes, trying not to burst into tears in public spaces after being triggered by something that reminds me of them, Decker’s film works like a soothing balm. It is like an ointment that has allowed me to ease the pain, at least temporarily. 

Fairytale logic subverts that logic of progress and allows for the creation of another world, one where healing from such a tremendous loss is possible. The Sky is Everywhere weaves this story of the unknown through the shades of blue, green, red and yellow. Lennie’s sister dies from fatal heart arrhythmia on stage, while performing her role as Juliette in a school spectacle. This tragic and sudden death gives birth to the film form that feels like an exaggerated performance, a spectacle itself. This embodies another aspect of working through grief, when we are expected to go back to our lives, to work and study, and sometimes all we can do is to pretend with our fake smiles glued to our faces. 

Lennie lives with her uncle and grandmother in a house surrounded by trees and an impressive garden. The house reminiscences a gingerbread house, but not one that is inhabited by an evil witch but rather by magical, benign creatures. Lennie’s family, although not perfect, seem to be equipped with magical powers: the grandmother growing the roses which she claims to have the capability to make people fall in love,  and the uncle with his ability to gently force anyone to confess their deeply hidden truths.

Lennie is a clarinettist who loses her ability to play her instrument after Bailey’s passing and instead engages in manic re-reading of her favourite novel Wuthering Heights, walking through forests (California’s enchanted forests filled with redwoods) and writing messages to her sister on the leaves). The fact that the clarinet is a wind instrument and thus requires Lennie’s breath to be played is poignant: while engulfed in grief we often lose our breath. Breathing ceases to be our second nature and we find ourselves grasping for air, panicking while our surroundings transform like we are trapped in a horrible nightmare from which we cannot wake up. Quoting Eric Harper and Charity N. Mwaniki, events like this involve 

“a temporary break, a kind of pure memory/dream space that is not fixed but which expands, a florid state of engagement with another time and reality that alienates the person from others and which often makes it impossible for him or her to get through the day and manage practical tasks“. ²

These moments of spatio-temporal collapse are the most powerful moments of the film. They are embodied by aerial, circular shots that hypnotise us, letting us leave our own bodies to float in the air with the film’s characters. They are accompanied by classical music that additionally collapses any meaning – there are no meanings, they are just feeling, and affects. There are two kinds of these floating moments, the dark and heavy, or the light ones when “I” becomes disrupted into uncountable singularities through joy. 

To conclude this review or rather my reflection on the film, watching The Sky is Everywhere was an extraordinary experience. It has helped me a bit to mend my broken heart and assisted me with finding some magic in the world around me. I’ve been able to see the world not only through the shades of grey but through blue, green pink, and yellow. When we lose someone whom we love, the part of us dies with their passing, transforming us into someone we do not recognise anymore. Such event alters the way we approach and interact with people we know who suddenly become strangers unable to understand us. Death is, however, the event without which life wouldn’t exist, it is unavoidable. We have a choice: either we will remain in a jarring void or decide to use to grow by facing the demons that the loss of our loved ones brings forth. I am, following Lennie, choosing the latter, holding onto hope that my “I” will soon be capable of collapsing through joy and graceful acceptance of the inevitable: change, loss, and the plethora of different kinds of deaths on which life is built. 

Footnotes

1. “We know nothing about a body until we know what it can do, in other words, what its affects are, how they can or cannot enter into composition with other affects, with the affects of another body, either to destroy that body or to be destroyed by it, either to exchange actions and passions with it or to join with it in composing a more powerful body.” in Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, “Becoming-Intense, Becoming-Animal,” in A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, translated by Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 257
2. Eric Harper and Charity N. Mwaniki, The Production of an Anxiety Dream Space Machine in Schizoanalysis and Ecosophy: Reading Deleuze and Guattari, edited by Constantin V. Boundas, (Bloomsbury Publishing Plc: London, 2018), p. 219