La Ciénaga

La Ciénaga, directed by first-timer Lucrecia Martel, uses a seemingly uneventful series of episodes and an atmospheric sense of impending doom to make a statement about the decadence of the Argentine middle class. The decaying families are portrayed without much sympathy, showing them as racist, uncaring, and self-indulgent.

The screen veritably pulsates with life and ugliness. Every frame is filled with children and animals running in and out, dogs barking, everyone talking at the same time, music blaring, and the TV bellowing something about Virgin Mary sightings. It's almost as if the camera is eavesdropping on an intimate family gathering, making the viewer feel like an uninvited guest at a party.

The narrative (such as it is) is about two families and their children thrown together at the end of a stifling hot summer, and how everybody bears the marks of carelessness and inattention: scars, burns, bruises. Nothing works in this milieu; the pool is very dirty, one boy has lost one eye, another is afraid of stories about dog-rats, drinking is excessive and accidents result as a consequence. The mother (Mecha) is a drunk who just seems to be waiting for the end to face life in bed for 20 years like her own mother. She makes racist remarks directed toward her servant, yells at her own daughter Momi, (who seems to be infatuated with the servant), and makes vague plans to go to Bolivia to buy school supplies for the kids.

La Cienaga is not easy to watch. It is moody, sensual, atmospheric, almost unbearably intimate, with a constant level of anxiety and tension. You can feel the humidity building on your forehead. Danger is always near, and violence seems not just possible but probable. There is an unspoken longing for something, anything good to happen to relieve the emptiness of life. I was reminded of Chekhov and Dostoyevsky. It is almost Bunuelian in its feeling but, unlike Bunuel, it is not dark comedy, just dark.

The unspoken backdrop is the recent history of Argentina, an unending nightmare of political violence, social unrest, and fiscal disaster. Only the children give us any hope for the future. It is a compelling picture of class arrogance with an ending as moving as any I've seen. Strongly recommended but bring a lot patience and a de-humidifier.

excerpt, more at my location - La Cienaga, or The Swamp, is the debut film from Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel. Originally released in 2001, the film announced the arrival of a unique new voice within international cinema. Finally granted a DVD release in the UK, it shows that the director of The Holy Girl and The Headless Woman had emerged with her distinctive and uncompromising vision of cinema already fully formed.

Beneath the surface banality of La Cienaga lies a resonant and troubling picture, the work of a filmmaker with a considered and singular artistic vision. Even if Martel's particular vision is likely to repel as many as it attracts, her film possesses a lingering, haunting power. Not especially enjoyable, but undeniably affecting.

This film meant a leap in Lucrecia Martel's career but also a blizzard of fresh air for Argentine cinema, which had become stiff and too ideological during the '90s. It has an interesting script, that keeps you absorbed by the tense climate and insinuated secrets at the home (maybe the main element of the movie), without great dramatic actions. However the major virtue of this film is in acting, sound and cinematography. The diverse and witty cast offers outstanding performances. The sound design is a solid example of what cinema can achieve through sound. While cinematography perfectly shapes the image according to each dramatic situation. In addition, the underlying themes, such as social differences and intrafamily secrets, are approached with admirable subtlety and depth.

How accurate La Ciénaga is when it comes to Argentinian life is something that you feel only a select number of people could vouch for. The world in which La Ciénaga, or 'The Swamp' in English, is set comes across as quite bizarre but relatively simple; rather routine but dare I say slightly backward at the same time. Despite the rural setting and the feeling of openness such a rural setting of rolling hills and vast countryside may carry with it, The Swamp feels cramped and claustrophobic with little space to move and few incidences in which you have a space to yourself. Indeed, someone may be in the shower and someone else will run in, needing to clean their muddy foot in the shower water. On other occasions, the mother when in her bedroom will sit upright and bellow at others to get out. Its this invasion of privacy and bogged down, cramped conditions that get across the greater moments of atmosphere in The Swamp even if the film is a little hit and miss overall.

I read that the director, Lucrecia Martel, made the film based on some pretty true to life experiences in their own home and has set the film in their home area of the Salta Province in Argentina and it shows. You do get the feeling the film is a very personal project; the sort of film that can only exist through personal experience and knowledge of what certain things were like in a certain environment. In this regard, Martel comes across as a competent and very personalised filmmaker who is more interested in delivering things how they were rather than how people might want them to be.

The approach shows for the best part of the runtime. The film is slow and brooding, boggy in its approach and bleached out in the lazy sun when it isn't enclosed during a rain break and everyone must huddle indoors. It doesn't look at story as much as it adopts the approach of 'what might happen if this was the scenario'. If what Martel says about her childhood is true then it would seem they've captured the feel and atmosphere perfectly.

But I suppose it's a criticism that Martel gets across this feeling without ever actually giving us something else to cling onto. It's all well and good establishing what it may have been like living in the conditions but apart from an effective juxtaposition of rural claustrophobia and sporadic weather, there isn't really much else to shout about. I don't think the film ever gets going out of second gear and I suppose I was looking for what it was like living at these times and in these conditions. Unfortunately, Martel grounds this film in the present day and that takes away some of the retrospective approach. This cuts the characters off from reality or 'the real world' meaning it could only have been made by a certain someone whose experienced it but it can take place anywhere and at any time. I found this a little disappointing because I wanted more from what it was like to live at this 'time' in these conditions but what I got was just the 'conditions' half of the deal.

The film sees two families living in an Argenitnian province and struggling with one another more than anything else. I suppose the film centres on Mecha (Borges), a fifty-something mother who drinks, insults and accuses maids and generally does not much else apart from visit her cousin Tali (Morán) and family in a nearby town. Mecha's family is calm and quite passive, something the film really wants to get across in the early exchanges and its a comparison that works well once they arrive at the cousin's house in the slightly busier urban setting of the town. Here, it is things as basic as quickening the editing and having everybody move around a little faster than usual that gets across the new sensation.

The film relies on tiny, real life encounters for both its antagonism and story lines. Mecha's drinking acts as a back-burning threat more than anything but I don't think we ever get the feeling she could erupt into anything more than the odd rant. Adding to the intimate and enclosed surroundings is a fair amount of sexual tension between certain characters, a boy changes his shirt in a public shop in front of watching girls and later on an incidence occurs when a girl puts lotion on her body in front of a watching male who lies topless on a bed in the sun drenched arena. This twinned with the fact everyone's in swimwear for most of the time gives off an, if anything, eerie feel to the film. What's also quite alarming are the scenes in which young children carry shotguns around in the woodland; initially these are used to good effect: we hear gunshots but assume it to be thunder and then some rain falls but what's actually happening is something a little less innocent.

I don't think The Swamp was a bad film but it was particularly uneven. I like the feel and the look of the film and the study of Mecha being this ill and cut off woman to the point young kids are running around with heavy artillery is interesting. The sexual tension and the ideas for antagonism and what-have-you are there but none of them are developed to any great length although that might be the point of the film: that stuff exists, stuff happens but never usually in the order or how you'd like it to transpire.

The previous comment - a scathing review - reads as an effective degradation of Martel's "La Ciénaga" to a wanna-be artsy movie that forgot to include a message to convey or even a story to tell. First of all: this is far from being the truth. Second: nonetheless most publics will probably take that impression away from seeing "La Ciénaga" if they do not know beforehand what to expect. That is neither the fault of the audience nor that of Lucrecia Martel's excellent movie.

Like other excellent directors from around the world, for instance her compatriot Daniel Burman recounting stories from Buenos Aires' Jewish community - Lucrecia Martel has (in my opinion wisely) decided that she will be at her best when telling about the world she knows best: the particular social setting of the Northwest Argentinean provincial capital Salta. A beautiful city, in a province ruled by a populist strongman, with mixed population, urban middle class and a upper crust of provincial landowner aristocracy, that is resistantly moving into a post-feudal age. The pace of life is slow - and comes to a near standstill during the long summer, where people of means escape into summer villages with a slightly preferable micro-climate.

Lucrecia Martel's movie has a "documentary" air about it - but it can only appear fake if one is angry at having paid eight bucks to see a film one does not understand because its appeal is entirely "local".

Now, even if you do not have a first hand experience of Argentinean society, let alone that particular subset that the one of Salta is and neither understand Spanish in its Argentinean version or even more the dialect of the Northwest (not only "ll" and "y" but also "rr"'s are pronounced "sh" as in Washington) you may enjoy the movie if you know the little I indicated above. And believe me: Salta is like that! Departing from this, you may in any case enjoy the excellent photography that perfectly fits and reverberates the pace of slouching decadence, and rejoice in the sometimes not so subtle symbolism of the dysfunctional and untimely nature of the beings populating the movie. The actors do an outstanding job at portraying characters with all the traits you could expect to encounter in Salta's summer mountain escapes. You can take my word for it: these people actually exist!

Is this artsy? While the location selected is one that stands for a niche in a niche market of current cinematography - Martel's choice is highly commendable: for it is this courageous choice that enables here to tell stories that she unlike any other can bring to the screen and apply to them all the skills of the craft she and her team have mastered. If you accept that you will enjoy a true gem of contemporary cinema. If you reject her choice, then at least waste a moment of your time that you had set out to complain about those ridiculously artsy movie directors and consider why Woody Allen may have decided to make one NYC movie after the other. And how much the Coen Brothers' works profit from their choice of more than peculiar regional settings.

My recommendation: take the time, open your mind, suppress the expectations and watch "La Ciénaga". Remember: if you don't like it, it's not your fault - but neither does it have to be Lucrecia Martel's.