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The Girl and the Spider (Ramon Zürcher and Silvan Zürcher, 2021)
🕑 Added 2021-03-04 22:11:09 +0000 UTC
[NOTE: Despite the watermarks on these stills, nothing will happen if you press 8.]
I think I can safely say that most readers of this Patre-blog were probably as bowled over as I was upon seeing Ramon Zürcher's debut film The Strange Little Cat back in 2013. The film seemed to come out of nowhere and played by its own distinct rules. I guess you could call it a structuralist family comedy, in which most of the action unfolds within a single apartment, where family members, animals, and a set of banal objects jostle for position, staking out oblique angles and precise spatial relationships. Although some aspects of The Strange Little Cat were overtly amusing, most of the joy of that film came from the fact that we never knew what we'd be seeing next. Simply walking from one side of a living room to another could provoke disorientation or near-catastrophe.
Now, Zürcher returns, with a film he made with his brother Silvan. The Girl and the Spider operates in an instantly recognizable style. This time, we are shuttled between different apartments, since one of the main characters is in the process of moving. Again, narrow interiors dominate the field, with outside shots mostly restricted to flashback reveries, or certain repeated motifs -- a jackhammer tearing up pavement, or a longing look out the window at a forlorn shop assistant stacking boxes. But the most dramatic shift from Cat to Spider is an intensification of personal relationships and the tension between various parties.
Cats walk on four legs, spiders on eight. This is apropos, since The Girl and the Spider doubles down on everything Strange Little Cat did, and moves a bit more quickly. The Zürchers have produced a film that is much the same as the previous one, only there's more of everything: more apartments, more foreground characters, more background characters, and a reconfiguration of Cat's dancerly awkwardness. This time, it's not just that everyone is in everyone else's way. Each interaction alludes to a complex interpersonal relationships to which we are barely privy. Strange monologues and semi-random remarks hint and imply long simmering resentments, erotic subtext, and deep psychological damage.
In particular, Spider projects an atmosphere that is so thick with multi-directional sexual tension that it could probably be measured in pascals. The two main characters are Lisa (Liliane Amuat), who is moving out, and Mara (Henriette Confurius), who is staying behind, and it is clear (from their body language, as well as a couple of dreamlike fantasy monologues) that the two were involved with each other. Also, Mara -- whose name we don't learn until around the midway point -- has a cold sore at the beginning of the film, and Lisa has it by the end. ("Something to remember me by.")
But everyone else in the film seems to be sexually connected somehow, with someone in the vicinity. Next-door neighbors and roommates may also be former or current lovers, and although this could very easily lend itself to door-slamming farce, the Zürchers play it all in mannered, slightly hypnotic mode, pitched between Brecht and Strindberg. While Lisa's mom Astrid (Ursina Lardi) is obviously putting the moves on handyman Jurek (André M. Hennecke), and the handyman's son Jan (Flurin Giger -- these names!!) is passed among the ladies like a second-rate fuck toy (he is literally the "handy man"), a couple of kids are on hand to watch with wide-eyed curiosity and confusion.
There is so much to admire about Spider, most of all its structure, which follows musical patterns much more than narrative ones. Actors and objects recur like motifs or conceptual totems. However, the Zürchers exhaust their formal palette very early, resulting in a rather grinding redundancy. It's a lot of couples exchanging weird stories and smoldering lust, punctuated by a sharp cut to someone (often Jan, or a kid) staring at the couple, violating their intimacy with their probing gaze. This happens over and over, and while there's certainly a logic to this -- intimacy, in part, means having the same conversations and arguments ad nauseum -- it drains the spontaneity and drives Spider into a rut. A web is definitely spun, but we're continually forced to walk through it.
