TIFF ’13: The Strange Little Cat

The_Strange_Little_Cat_Das_merkwrdige_Ktzchen

Das merkwürdige Kätzchen
****/****

directed by Ramon Zürcher

by Angelo Muredda In
his essay on the origins of the uncanny, Freud looks into German etymology to
find that heimlich is one of those words that means a
given thing as well as its opposite–that which is, on the one hand, familiar,
and also that which is kept out of sight. The unheimlich, or uncanny, is by that token always latent
within the ordinary–it’s the thing that should have stayed hidden away but has
instead come to light. People in Ramon Zürcher’s marvellous debut are always
calling the familiar things around them uncanny, and no wonder, given the alien
eye with which Zürcher observes them. Set in a bustling Berlin apartment that
houses a reserved matriarch, her visiting twentysomething children, her
adolescent daughter, her ailing mother, and a pair of pets (including the
ever-roving orange tabby that supplies the title), The Strange Little Cat
has the ingredients of a multi-generational melodrama about a family coming
together and splitting apart in an uneasily-shared space–an August: Osage County for the arthouse set. But Zürcher
happily forgoes such narrative dead ends in pursuit of something more playful
and unsettled, working with the weird formal properties of the objects that
fill this domestic space, from a child’s misspelled grocery list to a glass
bottle that spins around a bowl in the sink as if propelled by its own
volition.

Zürcher’s debut has been
compared to the films of Jacques Tati, and certainly the sound design, which
elliptically connects the piercing scream of a child with the whir of a remote-control helicopter and the hiss of a squirting sausage, puts us in mind of the
industrial whooshes of Play
Time
. Here, though, the joy of finding domestic things strange is
never far from something more troubling. If the inscrutability of cats is one
of the operating motifs–you could convincingly make the case that the
director’s authorial surrogate is the orange tabby who sees all from his
precarious vantage point–the other major one is surely the pressurized nature
of the family unit. While many of the compositions are one-shots, little
tableaus of individual family members or animals going about their unusual
rituals in barely-contained isolation, there’s always the sense of something
boiling up to a critical state just outside the frame, a natural consequence of
having this many bodies jammed into this small a space. You could call The Strange Little Cat a brilliant metaphor for the family as pressure cooker, then, but its genius
might lie in the equal attention it pays to the literal side of the
conceit–the image, for instance, of a pressurized bottle about to lose its
cap, one of several remarkable instances of an everyday object made beautiful
and menacing.

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