Diary

Larissa has cats. And at times, it seems as though we are watching her through a cat’s eyes. She and her husband, in their tiny apartment, while we sit in a corner, impassive witnesses to their daily life: debates over beer and recurring quarrels. Something in this life feels slightly in ruins, much like the battered apartment building that opens the film; perhaps like the Soviet empire, ten years after its collapse. Yet the film offers a strange escape from this harshness: Larissa’s grandmother had foreseen it all. More than 90 years ago, she had dreamed of and written down the troubles that would befall her granddaughter, who had not yet been born. The film thus oscillates between the utterly prosaic and the almost fantastical. The cats’ gaze then seems all the more piercing—and slightly unsettling: it is entirely possible that Larissa’s grandmother is a cat.

Jérémie Jorrand
Head of Programming and Editorial Content at Tënk France