‘The Girl and the Spider’: The Change of Feelings

After a hypnotic debut film, ‘The Strange Kitten’, in which the Swiss Ramon Zürcher showed an ingenious vision of family ties and a good hand for writing sharp dialogue, the director takes it one step further with “The Girl and the Spider”, shown in the Encounters section of the 71st Berlin Film Festival, as well as in the Official Section of the 66 SEMINCI of Valladolid and awarded at the Festival of Mar de Plata, where it won the prize for the best screenplay. On this occasion, the director forms a tandem with his twin brother Silvan.

“The Girl and the Spider”, in a way, it is a metaphor for the relationships reflected in the film, whose premise, roughly speaking, tells of the move of Lisa, a young woman in her twenties, who leaves an apartment in the heart of the city, which he shared with two young people of the same age, including Mara, with whom he seems to have a deeper relationship than that of an apparent best friend. With a screenplay by the Zürcher brothers themselves, the film combines scenes of intimacy, with dialogues in which the characters tell each other confidences, with others that allow them to distance themselves from what happens in that change of address.

That way of narrating personal relationships and daily conflicts can be seen in ‘The Strange Kitten’ and ‘The Girl and the Spider’, the Zürchers take advantage of it to expand it. Now with This second cinematic proposal, while leaving scenes and moments that know how to keep the audience’s attention, has a more anarchic narrative style., making it clear that for several days people have been talking about how bureaucratic and chaotic a transfer is. Added to this is that a series of situations are created in which the scenes, with certain costume designer touch, they break the pattern, provoking a certain degree of surrealism.

A remarkable intellectual exercise and a parable on loneliness and relationships

This style exercise hides a complicated sentimental relationship between the protagonists and here we must make particular reference to its title, as the film is an allegory of how a personal bond can lead to ambivalent affinities, because Mara, who sees her lover as far away from her side as possible, behaves very much like arachnids patiently waiting for a prey to fall in its web. And in this sense, the film shows that character in its various facets, because, in one way or another, each of the characters who interact in this move ends up being part of the web.

And in that fairytale, the Zürchers create a drama that evokes some of Hong Sang-soo’s proposals, such as the recent “In front of you” or “The woman who ran away”, especially in their ability to create a fascinating story from a tremendously mundane basis. Here you can see the good work especially of Henriette Confurius, who plays Mara, with whom she connects at certain moments, reaching a correct balance that reflects her personal vortex.

“The Girl and the Spider” is a parable about loneliness and friction in relationships, be they romantic, personal, family or friendship. An extraordinary exercise that places Zürcher as a Central European response to Hong’s independent style, as well as a way to recover that authorial spirit that Jan Ole Gerster had in ‘Oh Boy’.

Note: 7

The best: Scenes that apparently reveal little but say a lot, like a breaking cup or a falling plant.

Worse: He is too anarchic in his narrative, some cohesion in that aspect would have been appreciated.