“The Girl and the Spider” in Cinema – Purification of Life – Culture

The animated film has not yet managed to establish itself as a literary genre. Semi-finished rooms, unfinished furniture, and box landscapes do not provide monotonous backdrops, because this disjointed living space can hardly be understood except from the perspective of depth psychology.

In “The Girl and the Spider” the lives of Mara and Lisa are arranged and rearranged. Lisa (Lilian Amwat) moves from the communal apartment to her own apartment, which Mara (Henriette Confurius) does not like at all. The second feature film by Swiss directors Ramon and Sylvain Zürcher is about the emotional nature of the moment, and at first glance the two speak of it involuntarily funny: the characters have conversations with pictures of equipped kitchens and cordless screwdrivers, looking wooden as if they came from IKEA: “We lost seeing each other once. One. In a small town… I was looking for you everywhere. In the streets. Cafes…” Mara says, as if Lisa did not know all this herself, the characters call themselves such as “Queen of the Night”, or Strange and cruel stories break up for no reason, or conflict with each other in almost Dadaist dialogues. “Less is more. You just have to be careful not to get too much,” as the movie captioned it. These characters are not characters, but keywords and ghosts from a somewhat over-ambitious script. The camera for this is almost always rigid, which of course should inspire the film’s highest artistic claims. stressful.

But: in combination with, with some surreal exceptions, completely sober motion pictures, the artificial and detached texts create a special effect, a kind of second reality, like an emotional level, that is laid above the pictures as an ephemeral spider-web like cloth. This works mainly because Henriette Confurius, who, like Mara, with a crumbling facade of friendliness, under which anger and sadness frequently flashes, leads emotionally through the labyrinth of complex interpersonal relationships that this film touches by the dozen. A risky process, but it manages at its best moments to show something that would otherwise remain hidden from the photos alone.

girl and spiderSwitzerland 2021 – Director and script: Ramon Zurcher, Sylvain Zurcher. Camera: Alexander Haskerel. With: Henriette Conforius, Lillian Amoat, Andre Henick. salt donor. 98 min.