Director: Ramon Zürcher | Germany | Fiction | 2013 | 72 mins
Film source: Deutsche Film- und Fernsehakademie
Ramon Zürcher’s The Strange Little Cat is one of the most auspicious debuts in recent memory. The action (or inaction) is almost entirely confined to a Berlin apartment, where a delightfully dysfunctional family goes about its daily routine blithely unaware of the beauty and quiet revelations which surround their seemingly mundane lives. A former student of Béla Tarr (whose The Turin Horse was screened at VTIFF 2012), Zürcher’s deadpan sense of humor and focus on the mechanization of modern life recalls Jacques Tati’s Playtime, while the rigorously dispassionate performances of his actors contain traces of Robert Bresson and Chantal Akerman. But Zürcher’s cinematic language, which dispenses with traditional rules of shot composition and editing—often mismatching sound and visual cues and positioning actors partially outside the frame—is refreshing and bracingly original. Witty, humorous and strangely affecting, The Strange Little Cat announces the arrival of a major talent.