A black hole in the form of a bag, toys for the use of martial arts weapons, philosophical rocks: the ingredients of this film, where the owner of a laundromat finds himself immersed in parallel universities, made her too crazy to be a candidate for the Academy.
However, it ended up establishing itself as seven Oscars, Oscar, best director and best original screenplay for the creation of the duo Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan.
Cast primarily in Asia, a popular symbol of diversity in Hollywood, it also won the most awards during the week leading up to the Oscars.
A mix of action, school humor and science fiction, the films have ended up triumphing over serious rivals such as Steven Spielberg’s semi-autobiographical film “The Fabelmans”, Tom Cruise’s blockbuster “Top Gun: Maverick”, and the acclaimed tragicomedy “The Ghost Island”.
“Thank you, Academy. Studio A24. They saw our destiny and supported us for a year,” said Jonathan Wang, the producer of the film, receiving the golden statue.
This modest independent film not only Hollywood voters and the film industry, but also the general audience, grossed $100 million at the worldwide box office.
The film follows the unlikely odyssey of Evelyn Wang (played by Michelle Yeoh, who won the Best Actress Oscar for this role), a resident businesswoman overwhelmed by family concerns and financial problems.
During a tax audit, he discovers the existence of parallels and suddenly finds himself struggling to save humanity from an evil force that turns out to be the alter ego of his lesbian daughter Laetitia (Stephanie Hsu).
To achieve this, Evelyn must explore the multifarious dimension to join the forces of alternate life. With all the choices she didn’t make, this common mother wonders if her life could have made more sense and if she and her family would have been happier.
“Thrills of Love”
Although it’s filled with pop culture references and outlandish ideas, especially a universe in which human fingers have been replaced by sausages, “Everything Everywhere At Once” has deeply moving messages.
Audiences and voters “gave our concealment a chance” and won “experimental things too much” for them, Wang recently told AFP.
The film works because “every time you go out there’s an emotion of love,” Yeoh explained to the Los Angeles Times.
By centering the plot on a troubled mother-daughter relationship, “we tried to make an empathetic story about how difficult it is for our parents’ generation to understand our generation,” Scheinert told The Verge.
In many ways it is indeed a generational film. Directed by a thirty-something, it takes the multiverse concept of today’s superhero movie, but pulverizes the codes of the Marvel franchise.
The emergence of absurd ideas, arising from different things, provides a metaphor for modern life connected and saturated with information. Constantly lacking in something, everyone can feel oppressed, convinced that the supervillain “doesn’t matter”.
“This movie is almost a way of saying to us: ‘We see you in this mess.’ (…) Maybe we can find a way in the middle of all the noise,” Kwan summed up to the verge.
“Look at us now!”
It was originally written for Jackie Chan, but the lead was reworked for Yeoh, the martial arts superstar, giving the film a feminist tone and showing the Malaysian actress to show all her talents.
The movie is also complicated.
It transforms an ordinary family of Chinese immigrants into superheroes, with characters speaking alternately in English, Mandarin and Cantonese.
In addition to the career of Vietnamese-born actor Ke Huy Quan, who plays Waymond, Evelyn’s husband, a role that won him an Oscar for best supporting actor.
12 in 1984 by Spielberg for “Indiana Jones” and the Temple of Doom revealed, which disappeared from the agent due to lack of roles. But “everything everywhere at once” can change that.
As movie patriarch James Hong, 94, commented last month, Hollywood has made actors of Asian origin invisible for a long time.
“But look at us now,” he concluded.
