La Ciénaga (2001)
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Review #1,590 |
THE SCOOP
Director: Lucrecia Martel
Cast: Mercedes Morán, Graciela Borges, Martín Adjemián
Plot: The life of two women and their families in a small provincial town of Salta, Argentina.
Genre: Drama
Awards: Won Alfred Bauer Award (Berlin) & NHK Award (Sundance)
Runtime: 103 mins
Rating: Not rated (likely to be NC16 for some mature themes)
Source: Lita Stantic Producciones
IN RETROSPECT (Spoilers: NO)
Lucrecia Martel really hit it right out of the park with her debut feature, La Ciénaga, still considered one of the greatest works of 21st century Latin American cinema. She would go on to make three more features (so far!) with The Holy Girl (2004), The Headless Woman (2008), and her latest marvel, the abstruse and esoteric Zama (2017).
The Argentinian filmmaker’s largely chaotic approach to narrative, giving form and structure the cold shoulder, and adopting instead a freewheeling, sometimes elliptical, sometimes barely comprehensible treatment of the bourgeois domestic household story is something that might be better appreciated in retrospect, not only for its sheer brilliance, but also how we as audiences are sometimes ill-equipped to reconcile with dynamic new ways of filmmaking. La Ciénaga is an example of that kind of film, where its boldness and vitality are inspiring to behold.
Beginning with a sequence of an extended family dragging poolside chairs and tables (with Martel paying special attention to the noises they make, and likewise throughout La Ciénaga, sounds play a critical role) to find a comfortable spot in the sweltering heat for an afternoon nap, the film tells us nothing about these people except that they seem to be listless. Over in the distance, we hear gunshots as their young boys go hunting with friends.
We only make out the relationship between each character as the film progresses, which could be frustrating for some, or fascinating for others, including a pair of siblings with an undercurrent of sexual tension between them. There’s no real plot, and if it could be described in words, it’s about a family wasting away, seemingly waiting for divine help, or a cataclysmic incident to jolt everyone up again.
The sense of possible hope of a spiritual awakening is communicated over the news as someone claims to have seen the Virgin Mary on a roof. On the other hand, danger seems to lurk everywhere (e.g. the aforesaid young boys with rifles—what if a child accidentally shoots another child? Or a sequence involving the family trying to fish in a river with sharp knifes—what if someone stabs someone else?), with no one really caring, least of all the adults.
It is this creeping, foreboding sense of fate trying to force its way into an insular narrative, barricaded by the characters’ nonchalance (and sometimes innate racism) that gives La Ciénaga its unpredictability and inevitability. Moreover, because the film is so dense aurally and visually, where the fiery dialogue and pronounced use of ambient sounds counteract with many things that happen at the same time (sometimes within the same space of the family house), one could feel that Martel is waiting for the right moment for her work to dramatically explode. But that moment never comes, and at the end of the day, the film feels like it is trying to cap a gassy drink, and to Martel’s credit, it doesn’t feel for one second that her film is going to fizz out.
Verdict: This largely chaotic if elliptical drama about an extended Argentine family and their domestic woes boasts a rare sense of aural-visual density amid its unconventional form, in what is an extraordinary feature debut by one of Latin American cinema’s greatest talents.
GRADE: A
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