Film: La Cienaga
Release date: 6th December 2010
Certificate: 12
Running time: 103 mins
Director: Lucrecia Martel
Starring: Mercedes Morán, Graciela Borges, Martín Adjemián, Leonora Balcarce, Silvia Baylé
Genre: Comedy/Drama
Studio: ICA
Format: DVD
Country: Argentina/France/Spain
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.
The movie tells the story of two families' summer holiday, spent in a decaying estate in the mountains, as a record hot spell grips Argentina, and the neighbouring town of Cienaga is riveted by the appearance of the Virgin Mary on a water tower.
Tali is minding four small children with little help from her husband, who is preoccupied with the opening of hunting season. Her cousin, Mecha, is a borderline alcoholic living in a dilapidated country retreat with her husband Gregorio and her teen children. During one heavy drinking session, she slips and cuts herself on broken glass, instigating a visit from her son Jose, alongside Tali and her brood, as Mecha recuperates in bed.
What follows is not so much a family reaching crisis point, as one stuck in the deepest of ruts. These are characters that dimly sense something has gone wrong at some point in their lives, even if they do not know at what point, or where to lay the blame.
In the course of a season, two accidents bring the two families together, but together is a loaded term in Martel’s film of decay, dislocation and estrangement…
A group of middle-aged drinkers lounge around a putrid swimming-pool as the camera lingers on exposed flabby and worn-out flesh. The day is hot but not sunny, and thunder rumbles around the surrounding mountains. The incessant clicking of cicadas mixes with the clinking of ice cubes within wineglasses and the scraping of chairs across the patio floor in a combination all the more nerve wracking for never reaching a crescendo, like the sound of a tap dripping in the middle of the night. The children are out hunting in the mountains, where they come across a cow trapped in the treacherous swamp lands. Their semi-feral hunting dogs bark and snap at the visibly distressed animal as it sinks further into the mire. It’s an opening that is horribly effective in creating a mood of unease and tension, one which never quite leaves you, even as much of what follows seems banal and tediously uneventful.
For a while, the only way for British audiences to experience Martel’s latest film, The Headless Woman (La Mujer Sin Cabeza), was at the Tate Modern. In a way, this makes perfect sense for the art gallery seems more of a spiritual home to Martel than the cinema. Her films do away with basic film grammar (establishing shots, traditional film transitions), resulting in work more akin to video installation. The Headless Woman, when first shown at Cannes, was variously jeered at for being a boring muddle, or hailed as compelling and inspired, and it is likely Martel’s debut film will meet with similarly polarised opinion. The overt and more easily comprehensible sexiness of Martel’s international breakthrough film, The Holy Girl (La Niña Santa), feels like an anomaly in this light. Like The Headless Woman, La Cienaga is art-house with a capital A, unapologetically eschewing narrative and easily identifiable character motivation in favour of mood, atmosphere and a subjective approach to our interpretation of what the films means.
Reaching an understanding of La Cienaga’s underlying message is no easy task. At once oblique and blankly opaque, it could mean just about anything. It's filled with ideas and images that are never quite clear, that deliberately remain unreachable, like the image of the Virgin Mary that appears close to a water tank that we hear about but never get to see. Martel’s characters seem to have a life outside of the film; they begin before the film begins and they continue after the film ends. Scenes and even the majority of shots begin ‘in media res’ from actions that are already taking place, and often requiring us, as viewers, to weave the events together ourselves so they acquire meaning.
The American critic Roger Ebert, in a tellingly ambivalent review of the film upon its 2001 release, likened it to the experience of attending a family reunion when it’s not your family and your hosts are too drunk to introduce you around. It’s a useful analogy which touches upon the strange sense of familiarity and apartness we, as viewers, experience as we watch events unfold. We feel within the film, and, at the same time, discomfited by our sense of being voyeurs as we watch a family in quiet turmoil going about their everyday lives. It’s a well worn subject but rarely has it been approached in such an un-movie-like manner. It is literally as if we have been granted a glimpse into the workings of a real family, with all the mundane banality of their everyday reality presented in relentless and painstakingly rendered detail.
Though nothing quite matches the overpowering vividness of the opening, Martel takes naturalism to a degree rarely seen in modern cinema. Her knack for establishing tactile hyper-reality can be overwhelmingly palpable; you can almost smell the sweat and unwashed hair, the dank bedrooms and festering swimming-pool. Heightening the uneasy mood is the movie's busy sound design, which itself is amplified by the absence of a musical score. While seemingly improvised, La Cienaga was actually carefully scripted. It is testament to Martel’s skill, as well as the naturalistic performances of the largely non-professional cast (particularly the younger members), that nothing appears on screen that does not feel completely intentional.
Tentative themes do emerge, like murk from the eponymous swamp. Many of the children carry wounds or are disfigured in some way – one has a scar instead of an eye; one young boy is mysteriously forever being cut; another breaks his nose in a fight. These wounds are indicative of hidden dangers which seem to lurk just off screen, as well as portents of a tragic accident which will befall one young child towards the end of the film. Close ups linger on the mouth of one boy whose mangled gums bear the trauma of adult teeth coming in, one tooth coming in through the roof of his mouth - a painful process of entering adulthood. The matriarch Mecha lies in her bed, the cuts on her chest slowly turning into scars. Every time the children look at the adults they seem to sense what lies in store for them. For all their self-involvement, these are characters that do not stop to think and are constantly at risk of repeating life based on the dysfunctional models lived by their parents. Mecha, in a rare moment of lucidity, wonders whether she will end up a bed-ridden alcoholic just like her mother before her. Tali, the most sympathetic adult character and seemingly most clear-sighted, justifies speaking about familial problems in front of the children by insisting they must know so as not to repeat the same mistakes. It is ironic that her negligence leads to that final accident involving her own child.
Other themes touch upon problems within Argentine society in general. That Mecha’s family own a country house indicates this was a family that were once rich; but the building is run down, the pool fetid - the apparent downturn in their fortunes seems linked to the collapse of the Argentine economy. The casual racism practiced by both the adults and children towards the native servants offers a further glimpse of that society’s dysfunctional class dynamics and problematic race relations.
Martel’s major theme, though, is ennui; and it is her willingness to explore everyday ennui and treat it with the same dramatic presence as any other great subject which most characterises La Cienaga. It certainly won’t be to everyone’s taste, and even those who buy into Martel’s cinematic vision will undoubtedly find much of the film a gruelling and, it has to be said, often boring experience. In keeping with the extremity of Martel’s oblique method, the real drama is destined to occur only after her film is over. The young boy’s accident, which may be fatal, occurs out of sight of the other characters, and is left undiscovered as the film ends. It says something about the film’s murky ambivalence that the possibility of something good may come of this - at the very least, it might shock the characters out of their rut. Of course, that could just be grasping at straws, in a film that offers very little in the way of optimism.
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. GJK
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