Over two days, as Lisa (Liliane Amuat) moves from a shared apartment to one of her own with the help of her mom, friends, and hired movers, her now ex-roommate Mara (Henriette Confurius) tags along, unwilling to help the process forward but unable to let Lisa go. Set mostly inside the two apartment buildings, Das Mädchen und die Spinne (The Girl and the Spider) is an immersive and metaphorically rich story of shifting worlds, mounting tensions, and complex relationships that alternates between realism and the fantastical in a style characteristic of the film’s writer-director duo, Ramon and Silvan Zürcher.
Ramon Zürcher garnered international recognition and established a distinctive filmmaking style with his 2013 feature debut, The Strange Little Cat. Now he’s back, this time with his brother co-helming the anticipated follow-up feature, The Girl and the Spider, which premiered at the 71st Berlinale and tied as the winner of Best Director in the Encounters competitive section.
Once again, the Zürchers employ an effective static camera and vigorous mise-en-scene to showcase a carefully choreographed chaos of interior living space where the lives of adults, animals, and children converge. The Zürchers’ choice of specific diegetic sounds and visual details create an authentic experience of moving apartments, while the enclosed space of an interior setting and frequent medium close-up shots heighten the tension between the characters. It’s this tension which enables us to identify relationship dynamics, orient ourselves amidst the fluid pacing and large ensemble cast, and keep up with shifting alliances throughout the film.
Mara is often at the centre of these changes as we see her world crack and shift beneath her, like the fissured cement she observes crumbling under a construction worker’s drill outside her apartment. After Mara shares with Lisa an intimate memory of their friendship in a barely disguised plea, Lisa commands her to “let go” as she yanks a cloth out of Mara’s hand and walks away. Mara tries to hold on, inserting pieces of herself into Lisa’s new apartment in often passive aggressive acts to combat the rising feeling that she’s becoming a ghostly presence in Lisa’s world. Even Mara’s neutral-coloured clothes blend into the walls around her, another of the Zürchers’ exquisite visual details. Mara scratches Lisa’s counter, spits in the toilet, and leaves behind her bloody finger bandage. But dynamics are always shifting, and as Mara loses Lisa, she gains a surprising confidante in Astrid (Ursina Lardi), Lisa’s mother, and a tense romantic triangle with Jan (Flurin Giger), one of the movers, and Kerstin (Dagna Litzenberger Vinet), Mara’s downstairs neighbour.
The Zürchers’ carefully crafted realism is interrupted frequently by fantastical sequences and poetic dialogue in which characters share snippets of memories, dreams, or observations. The narrative moves whimsically through these moments as much as through the characters’ relationships, eschewing a traditional narrative arc. We ache for these surreal sequences to provide relief from the constant tension, and sometimes they do: Mara’s whimsical tale about a former tenant who works as a chambermaid on a cruise ship weaves itself in and out of the later half of the film, and Kerstin’s vampiric roommate, Nora (Lea Draeger) adds a creepy levity as she drifts through their apartment, naked but for a motorcycle helmet evocative of outer space. Glimpses into peripheral characters including the mysterious shop girl across the street and Mrs. Arnold and the cat enhance the surreal impression of living inside a storybook, particularly as Mara breathes life into them though her quietly assured narration.
Characters observing characters is a continuous thread in the The Girl and the Spider. The many silent looks pack a punch of unsaid meaning. Mara in particular constantly watches others, with a heightened intensity courtesy of Confurius’ striking eyes. She watches jealously as Lisa makes friends with a new neighbour. She watches the beguiling shop girl across the street, creating a life for her in her head. She watches the chambermaid on a cruise ship in a clever piece of editing. But others, in turn, watch Mara — Jan, one of the movers, making his romantic interest known. A neighbouring child, with a harsh question in her eyes. Astrid, at first in disdain and later with compassion. Meanwhile, the titular spider (which is unnecessarily large, in this arachnophobe’s humble opinion) observes them all from different corners of the apartment and occasionally from its spot on someone’s back. The arachnid’s presence and Mara’s connection to it is given deeper meaning when Mara recounts a childhood memory of a spider companion that disappeared one day, never to return.
The Girl and the Spider speaks to cycles of endings and beginnings, the fluidity of evolving relationships, and the inevitability of disappearing. While it could be received as a rather depressing interpretation of life, instead the film encourages living in the present, savouring current connections, and recognizing that a relationship’s end paves the way for new ones to develop.
Score: B+
© 2021. UniversalCinema Mag.