Der Spatz im Kamin

How to end a film trilogy that covers a span of a dozen years? After the cat(s) (Das merkwürdige Kätzchen, 2013) and the spider(s) (Das Mädchen und die Spinne, 2021), with Der Spatz im Kamin it’s now the turn of the sparrow(s) as they try to escape the house (that cats and spiders would inhabit). The three animals embody three different approaches to the question of living in the house: being in a family or familiar place, or simply being together, which is respectively: ambiguity, construction, and liberation. This is nothing but a speculative interpretation, which should be complemented with all the other animals that punctuate – not without a great dose of virtuosity – the narrative lines of the three films.

With said lines, Ramon and Sylvan Zürcher build a filmic language of high control and systematic accidents, whose connection takes the shape of both gentle and violent choreography between the camera, the actors and the animals. The psychological layer is carried by the dialogues, where elements of explanation are regularly challenged by the accidents and the animals, which break, relaunch, and question any explanatory discourse. They constitute a sort of metaphysical layer that balances and triggers the tensions of the psychological layer, which focuses mainly on female characters divided between nostalgia and initiative, passivity and aggressivity, conservation and emancipation. How to end all of this?

It is not an easy task. That’s why four film critics gathered in Locarno after the premiere of Der Spatz im Kamin in order to discuss the end of the film, and of the trilogy. A series of dramatic peaks confused some of the critics: are they the symptom of the difficulty in finding one way out of the house? Instead of Shakespearian killings, we bear witness to a crescendo of complexity in the relationships of the characters, causing the psychological layer’s to prevail – eventually reducing animals and accidents to sheer metaphors. A lovers’ triangle, where the women lead, seems to hint at a non-patriarchal liberation from any form of relationship of power, yet the final exclusion of the extra-marital lover appears to some critics a final transformation of the plot in a revenge story. These are just some of the intriguing insights that the last wonderful work of the Zürcher brothers incites, leading to a temporary evaluation of the astonishing aesthetics they have built with this filmic trilogy.