Ramon Zürcher’s “The Strange Little Cat,” which receives a one-week exclusive run at the Film Society of Lincoln Center beginning August 1, takes place completely in and around the apartment of a typical Berlin family, mostly in the kitchen. It’s a tight fit for the group that keeps growing over the short 70-minute running time, as aunts, uncles, cousins, the grandmother who lives upstairs, and the family cat, a ghost-like presence, gather for dinner.
The apartment is either a prison or a refuge, depending on how you read the film. During the film’s festival run over the past year, Variety called the “The Strange Little Cat” an “unconventional domestic drama,” while the Hollywood Reporter wrote that it “finds a world of comic possibility.” Both compared it to French comedic director Jacques Tati and Chantal Akerman. The polarized and confusing opinions are due to the film’s detachment — there is no “story” to speak of, dialogue is delivered in a straight, deadpan style, and the formal arrangement is based around a bare minimum of static shots and cuts. It’s easy to fall under the spell of the film’s rhythms while leaving the theater wondering what just happened.
Camera composition is central to the effect “Strange Little Cat” holds over the viewer, offering even further displacement. Characters are often positioned alone within the frame, holding conversations with others characters off screen. From the fixed position, the camera is not choreographed to follow the action but lets the action choreograph itself around the frame. This strange formal approach keeps the film from being pure documentation, and makes many of the scenes unsettling. Withholding everything that is outside, you never know when something will penetrate the rigid composition.
Adding to the uneasiness is what I’ll call, for lack of a better term, the sonic narrative. While the visual elements of the film resist interpretation, there is a whole world of sound happening behind (and sometimes in front) of the image that encourages it: The constant hum of kitchen appliances threatens to drown out the dialogue; sirens can be heard in the distance; a young boy screams out in the street. For the most part the sound completely exists within the world of the film — the type of sound you would most likely hear in any apartment in any city if you opened your ears and paid attention. But Zürcher uses these sounds as a defacto soundtrack (bracketed by one simple piece of music, by San Francisco trio Thee More Shallows, repeated multiple times throughout the film) that, when existing alongside the relative blankness of the images, gives the sense of a drama arising out of the shadows and slowly creeping into the “story.” Danger is always lurking just outside of what we can see, but we can hear it coming, closer and closer.
But “The Strange Little Cat” isn’t building toward a climax. There is no payoff at the end, no surprising or shocking moment that easily explains everything that came before it. The pleasures of the film come from what is right in front of us, even if they’re not easily recognizable — the peculiar details of domestic life, the beauty of formal simplicity, and that strange little cat whisking his way through every scene in the film.
