By Daniel Bickermann. It starts out harmlessly enough. With sluggish lounge music playing in the background we watch a prototypically bored couple sitting at the dinner table of their Art Nouveau living room. The scene seems to mirror the depressing closing image of CITIZEN KANE’s famous “fast forward marriage montage”: She’s reading the papers with her hair put up in a bun, while he broods with his tie loosened up, obviously wondering how his life could sink so low. All of this filmed in chilling black and white with sharp contrasts. Bonjour, Tristesse!

A fight to the death

When either not even the papers can bring any more distraction or the boredom with her husband gets overwhelming, the women goes to catch the Scrabble game, the traditional pastime of the educated middle class – and suddenly the mood of the film takes a sharp turn: thrilling music sounds in the form of trembling strings, a screeching chalk on a blackboard marks the couple’s score and the tension rises in the form of oral substitutional satisfaction like cigarettes or the sucking on scrabble tiles, which traditionally is not without its dangers.

Because when the game gets serious it has a feedback on reality itself: When the wife put together the word “transpiration“, the husband has to spontaneously do away with his shirt, which is drenched in sweat; and when he uses her short absence to plunder the bag with the letter tiles, he only manages to put together the word “cheat“ – double word meaning meets triple letter score. And so reality influences the game and vice versa – and the result may not always turn out how the assiduous spellers would have liked them to.

Homicidal tendencies on the Scrabble board

The scenes of a marriage remain completely silent – if there has ever been a time, when the (English) Scrabble words used to be a means of marital communication between these two partners in horror, then these word, too, have long since changed to expressions of the protagonists' hateful subtexts. But the man suffers from a memorable disadvantage: he limits his lecherous murder fantasies against his frigid wife to the world of his thoughts exclusively (according scenes are repeatedly shown from the husband's perspective as a kind of cinematic “stream of consciousness”) – whereas his wife is able to live out her homicidal tendencies right there on the Scrabble board. And since at this film's beginning there was the word and the word was more powerful than the image and the word is made flesh, it is of course she that will in the end defeat her husband .

Her psychotic laughter afterwards is just as unsettling and abrupt as the whole Beckett-like setting of the film: this living room at the end of time itself, populated with dying characters in their fatal endgame. For her film, Barbara Seiler, who studied at the Zurich University of the Arts, has put on a strangely timeless duel, set on a beautifully lit surface, with elegant direction and intentionally clunky performances. There can be no real winner in this game – but an almost forgotten board game makes another furious appearance on the scene.

Links

• DEATH BY SCRABBLE (CH 2008. Barbara Seiler)
• Manual Earthquake – An Interview with Barbara Seiler
• Missed Opportunities – Tamar Noort about the Swiss film market