10/08/2024 - This time directing solo, Ramon Zürcher enchants us with his unmistakeable style, treating us to a dark film that questions ideas about heteronormative families

Competing for the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival, The Sparrow in the Chimney [+see also:
trailer
interview: Ramon and Silvan Zürcher
film profile] might have been directed solely by Ramon Zürcher but his brother Silvan, with whom he directed his previous movie The Girl and the Spider [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ramon Zürcher and Silvan Zü…
film profile], hasn’t totally abandoned him, given that he’s responsible for the film’s production. But it isn’t “just” films that the Zürcher brothers create; they offer up full-blown worlds rich in head-spinning detail. Entering into their world is a bit like rifling around inside a magician’s hat and pulling out mysterious and intriguing objects. Starting with the titles of their works - The Strange Little Cat [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Ramon Zürcher
film profile], The Girl and the Spider and The Sparrow in the Chimney – Ramon’s (and Silvan’s) movies scatter so many tiny clues, which we viewers are expected to gather in order to reconstruct a story which seems to carry on between one work and the next. And what they all have in common, and what also transpires in this latest film, is a meticulous observation of social dynamics, among family and/or friends, aimed at foregrounding those small, suspended moments which highlight the artificiality of these dynamics and reveal people’s individual weaknesses.

The protagonists of The Sparrow in the Chimney (as in all of the Zürcher brothers’ films, women are central to the story) are two very different sisters: the cold if not outright icy Karen (Maren Eggert) and extrovert Jule (Britta Hammelstein). The former lives with her two teenage daughters, her youngest son and her husband Markus (Andreas Döhler) in her parents’ pastoral home, which they’re readying for a party on the occasion of Markus’s birthday, while Jule lives far away with her husband and two small children. There’s also the mysterious dog-sitter, a former biologist, as she describes herself, played by Luise Heyer, who lives in a little house on the shore of a lake and whom we learn is Markus’s lover. On the day before the birthday party, when Jule arrives at the family home - a repository for painful memories relating to their deceased, despotic mother - everything seems to falter. Amidst this impossible-to-maintain equilibrium and surrounded by beautiful snapshots of uncontaminated nature and words which cut like knives, the cohesion of the family gradually falls apart.

Spoken with appalling coldness and nonchalance, insults like “you’re a monster!”, “don’t think that I love you just because you’re my mother” and “I hate you”, echo throughout the family home with lugubrious grace, as if wanting to swallow up everyone and everything and destroy any glimmer of hope. Suffocated by terrible, painful memories, by photos, objects, gold-rimmed crockery and furnishings from another time, Karen struggles to free herself from a past which is slowly but surely destroying her and turning her into a cold and empty statue.

Light years away from the reassuring perfection which society invariably associates with heteronormative families, the film reflects upon the power relations and contradictions inhabiting a group of individuals who are bound together by blood ties which now seem to have turned toxic. But what if the only way they can begin to love themselves is if they forget their duties as children, parents, sisters, etc, and rediscover themselves more freely and sincerely as something new, like sparrows escaping from the chimney in which they’re trapped?

A kind of dystopic fairy tale with horror film overtones, the movie transports the audience to a cruel but sincere world where people have freed themselves from the dictates of a society intent on assigning roles to each of us at birth, and are finally discovering their true, wild, defiant, animal nature.

The Sparrow in the Chimney was produced by Zürcher Film GmbH (Switzerland) and SRF Schweizer Radio und Fernsehen. Cercamon is managing international sales.  

(Translated from Italian)