Zirneklis

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DIRECTED BY: Vasili Mass

FEATURING: Aurelija Anuzhite, Liubomiras Laucevicius, Algirdas Paulavicius

PLOT: A teenage girl who dreams of spiders attracts the attention of a mysterious painter.

COMMENTS: A priest and an artist walk into a bar. . . well, actually they meet in the artist’s studio and drink coffee, but they have a revealing conversation nonetheless. The priest prefers the artist’s early works, painted in the style of the Italian Renaissance. In contrast, his current works appear much darker, inspired by the likes of Hieronymous Bosch and Caravaggio. “It’s a changing world,” the artist says by way of explanation, “and we’re changing with it.” “We’re changing,” the priest corrects him, “and so we change the world.”

Spider opens with a quotation from Sigmund Freud (“Subconscious sexual desires are closely linked to the sense of fear”). This sets it up to be a softcore tale of burgeoning adolescent sexuality, though one with serious art-house vibes (in an early scene, the main character imagines herself entering a Pre-Raphaelite bower where she clutches a bouquet of pink flowers to her heart as trickles of blood seep between her fingers). The film then abruptly cycles through various genres, from a Gothic mystery in a haunted medieval castle to, by the nightmarish finale, a full-blown seventies-style satanic horror. Like its antagonist, it constantly changes form, leaving the viewer wondering just where it will go next.

The plot seems simple enough at first. The priest commissions the artist to paint an Annunciation scene for a homeless shelter. The artist spots teenaged Vita at the church and tells the priest he’ll only take the commission if she’ll model for the Virgin Mary. The priest agrees and says he’ll convince Vita to pose for the painting.

Though ostensibly a wholesome girl, one who chooses to hang out at church rather than in night clubs, vivid dreams and hallucinations of spiders plague Vita’s sleeping and waking moments. Her dreams and reality continue to intersect after her first visit to the artist’s studio. One of the other models tells Vita to beware of the artist since he was once bitten by a spider. He then begins to haunt her dreams, along with other ominous black-robed figures and insects.

Made in Latvia on the cusp of the Soviet Union’s collapse, Spider feels like a time capsule of its era, but also of earlier filmmaking conventions. Scenes of paintings come to life feature actual actors posed on detailed sets in elaborate costumes. The titular spider is a massive puppet with many, partly animated, writhing appendages. The ending includes practical effects worthy of Luigi Cozzi, evoking nostalgia for the days when corpses routinely exploded with glue and Jello. Director Mass is also obsessed with lighting effects; soft focus lens flares and rainbows characterize nearly every shot. The score, too, travels through the decades. The main theme, a pastoral with pan pipes, accompanies Classical, opera, and late ’80s synth stings whenever the suspense ratchets up.

After waking from a nightmare with spider bites on her back, Vita’s mother takes her to a doctor. Upon examination, the bites are gone; the doctor diagnoses auto-hypnotic suggestion and recommends a period of rest in the country. Vita’s mother then sends her to visit her aunt, who lives in a castle on an island. Since the modeling job creates conflict between mother and daughter, the priest decides to call off the commission. He tells the artist Vita will no longer be his model, then leaves his studio before the artist can argue with him. The scene then repeats, and in the second version, the artist informs the priest he will not be dismissing Vita. She now belongs to him, and she will be his, until he finishes the painting.

Meanwhile, Vita happily moves into her aunt’s castle where she’s warned against a mysterious bedroom that’s off-limits. The isolated island community, peopled with various strange characters, provides a verdant setting for more imaginative erotic set-pieces. By this point in the narrative, a critical viewer might fault the director for introducing a series of plot threads without ever tying them up.

A more charitable viewer may assume the director intended to create a tangled web of the plot. The artist tells the priest, “Both evil and good are threads of a spider web. . . untangle it and they’re gone, both good and evil.” Mass complicates the narrative as Spider moves beyond the highly eroticized reveries of a horny teenager. There are shades of Pygmalion and Galatea, and one possible interpretation attributes Vita’s experiences to Stendhal Syndrome. Either way, far from being a merely evil foil to the good priest, the artist comes across as a much more ambiguous character, though in the end, he’s vanquished (or is he?) by the sign of the cross.

The artist’s dialogue centers on themes of surface appearances, control, manipulation, and illusion. He tells Vita appearances are deceptive because they hide the soul, and “the soul is a great mystery.” By the end, Spider suggests the pertinent issue isn’t Vita’s sexual allure. It’s her dreams, the secrets of her soul, which beg the question, in a rapidly changing world, how can you tell the difference between mirage and reality?

WHAT THE CRITICS SAY:

“…psychedelic and often jaw-dropping Eastern European mash up of Walerian Borowczyk and Alain Robbe-Grillet…”- Nathaniel Thompson, Mondo-Digital