2021 ‘Das Mädchen und die Spinne’ Directed by Ramon Zürcher, Silvan Zürcher
Lisa is moving. Upheaval all around: Her mother flirts with a handyman. An eccentric woman seems to be preparing for a glamorous event, a family next door returns from vacation, and a girl documents the adventurous day. As boxes are transported, walls painted white, and furniture is assembled, underlying problems in need of fixing are revealed, a to-do list expands, and desires and needs flair up.
La Jeune Fille et l'Araignée, La ragazza e il ragno, Örümce ve Kız, A Garota e a Aranha
Human beings connected by cigarettes, broken plants, tea, herpes and spiders. A film where architecture is explored through how bodies relate to it rather than through its own exploration. Gazes, gestures, objects and transmission. That’s the key word, transmission (or connection, depending on the point of view), a movie on how things get broken or move and change while somehow staying the same, only apart, just like the sea. How people relate to space and how space changes the way they relate between themselves. It’s a very cerebral film, assembled by a perfectly arranged rhythmic montage and a superb sound design, everything very on the nose and millimetrically controlled, but the attention to detail renders it so human and touching. It’s definitely very pretentious, termite cinema that feels like white elephant cinema, very sanitized formally and overcontrolled: it’s really not my style and I surely should have hated it, but somehow I just found it very lovely and beautiful.
made me feel how normies feel when they have to sit through an 'arthouse' film >-<
There's a closeup of a penis and a naked girl wearing a motorcycle helmet.
Must be art I guess.
I appreciate the potential here more than I actually enjoy this experience. The Girl and the Spider is unlike anything I've seen in a really good way, and the stylish choices are shockingly admirable, although I do have some bones to pick with the script.
The Girl and the Spider is an arthouse slow-burn that almost wins me over despite its lack of story. It microscopically documents the moving out of one girl out of her apartment over the span of several days, without spoiling almost any substantial background information regarding its characters. The audience is forced to infer from the crumbs of clues out of the naturalistic shots. It's almost voyeuristic how the directing duo the Zürchers manages to…
The experience of "The Girl and the Spider" makes the audience reach the peak of their cinematic pleasure from two perspectives. The pleasing feeling of an emerging filmmaker being able to show his components with the same power he started it, and again inviting us into deep ecstasy, doubles the pleasure of watching a film for me. What the Zürchers do with the routines and the placement of human figures is a masterpiece. The film shows the delicate structure of relationships to the audience, which have formed their fabulous nature with layers of destruction and beauty.
In a lot of ways, The Strange Little Cat feels like the developed follow-up and this feels like the promising but incomplete debut. This film is immaculately staged, blocked and executed, with a shocking number of bodies criss-crossing a small space with almost balletic perfection, but where Cat had a warmth and whimsy to its goofy treatise on human connection, there never seems to be a human core to give its formal complexity true weight. All throughout this I kept thinking "this must be what Wes Anderson skeptics feel while watching his movies," aesthetic precision but emotionally hollow. That it is reaching so hard for the delicate pleasure of its predecessor makes it all the more frustrating. Still, crisp cinematography and almost Hockney-esque use of explosive color to depict the everyday, combined with that controlled chaos of movement, makes this too sumptuous a visual pleasure to dismiss. I hope to revisit it somewhere down the road.
A bit more narrow conceived than The Strange Little Cat, but Zürchers near musical conception around the idea of departure does give it a playful center.
TIFF 2021
Film #1
Reason for pick - director of The Strange Little Cat
You don't watch a Ramon Zürcher film, you move around and through it. You are a fly, or maybe a spider, on a wall and Zürcher's characters don't play for you, they live in their own world living their own lives.
A roommate is moving out. That's it.
Much like his first feature, the wonderful The Strange Little Cat, Zürcher re-writes the cinematic rules to create an experience that's unique and, to some, completely captivating.
N.B. - We recommended The Strange Little Cat to our LB good friend CindyT back in the day... and I think she contemplated murdering us after watching it for us recommending it ... so buyer beware!
HIFF ended yesterday and it was really successful compared to last year. Last year wasn’t bad but this was phenomenal aside from a minor dip in quality toward the end. I wish I had been able to squeeze in at least one African movie but most of the ones that would’ve fit my schedule were older releases. Anyways… The Girl and the Spider was, oddly enough, one of my most anticipated releases, despite having not received any raving reviews. It sounded like an absurd little film and I saw a few people mention Lanthimos in their reviews so I imagined it would be an appropriate way to finish the festival. That decision paid off big time.
The…
Letting go. Holding on. Time.
There are films where the story is in the narrative, events unfolding.
There are films where the story is in the dialogue, conversations driving it forward.
There are films where their significance lies in their message, giving it meaning.
Yet still, there are others where you will find the story in the nuance, the melodious undertones, the muted gestures, the flickerings of the eye, a fleeting expression, an abrasive moment, a warm smile.
This film is all about the nuance; the things unsaid, moments of rapturous joy, furtive looks, and whistful glances, all laden with meaning.
This was perfectly elegant.
Soft lushes cinematography slowly breezing from moment to moment, capturing every performance beautifully. Each character…
