How entertaining? ★★★★☆
Thought provoking? ★★★☆☆ 1 January 2014
This article is a review of THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT.
Seen at the Toronto International Film Festival 2013. (For more information, click here.)
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“The towel is dirty; you will get a rash,” Mother (Jenny Schily) to Karin (Anjorka Strechel)
THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT might one day be hailed in certain quarters as a mini-masterpiece. A rare experience: Simultaneously invigorating and relaxing. Spending a day in the life of an extended middle class family might seem like your idea of eye-watering tedium; but give this gem a chance and it will burrow its way into your mind. Writer-director Ramon Zürcher’s debut feature astounds. Beyond the joys of discovering in a festival environment, owning it, one soon realises, will be a necessity – re-watching to take in all the glorious detail. At only 72 minutes, that is some achievement.
Opening on a rapturous piece of music (that would not have been out of place in THE GREAT BEAUTY), ‘Pulchritude’ by Thee More Shallows, it becomes a recurring tool to deepen the emotion as we grow to care about the family unit. No context/back story is offered, we are dropped into young daughter Clara (Mia Kasalo) screaming, as young kids are wont to do, while coffee brews. These aural, and later physical, jolts shock us out of serene reverie.
THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT might one day be hailed in certain quarters as a mini-masterpiece. A rare experience: Simultaneously invigorating and relaxing. Spending a day in the life of an extended middle class family might seem like your idea of eye-watering tedium; but give this gem a chance and it will burrow its way into your mind. Writer-director Ramon Zürcher’s debut feature astounds. Beyond the joys of discovering in a festival environment, owning it, one soon realises, will be a necessity – re-watching to take in all the glorious detail. At only 72 minutes, that is some achievement.
Opening on a rapturous piece of music (that would not have been out of place in THE GREAT BEAUTY), ‘Pulchritude’ by Thee More Shallows, it becomes a recurring tool to deepen the emotion as we grow to care about the family unit. No context/back story is offered, we are dropped into young daughter Clara (Mia Kasalo) screaming, as young kids are wont to do, while coffee brews. These aural, and later physical, jolts shock us out of serene reverie.
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Gradually THE STRANGE LITTLE catalogues the minutiae of daily ritual; intricately choreographing a carousel of family members as they come into shot. A fixed camera never presents the whole picture at one moment – perhaps knowing it is impossible to capture the complexity of group dynamics straightforwardly. As the players take the stage, they interact with those bustling on the edge of frame or completely out of view. We assume the family members are listening and paying attention as we do (there is no guarantee). Maybe they are just filling dead air with their observations? Or reacting to the dour sun to which their solar system revolves around, mother (Jenny Schily)? The matriarch is not given a name of her own (nor barely any of the older generation). The rest of her brood sporadically babble. The soundscape is mesmerising.
The family comes across initially as playful, but looking back disquiet is present. Mother does tell an anecdote of the previous day’s visit to the cinema, involving a man resting his foot on hers through the entire movie while both remain silent. An odd reaction to such physical contact, in an odd story, begins a suggestion of profound unhappiness. Another watch is definitely necessary to improve the household readings.
Cutaway shots observing ephemera (orange peel, cup of tea) and the energetic (wheeling radio controlled toy helicopter) might have fallen into the trap of hilarious art-house blather, had THE STRANGE LITTLE CAT not been so elegantly labyrinthine.