|||||| The Planet of Great Moviez ||||||||: La Ciénaga ( 2001)

Notwithstanding the sweltering Argentine heat and a herd of noisy children, teenagers, and half-wild dogs, Lucrecia Martel's La Ciénaga is a veritable Chekhov tragicomedy of provincial life. Making a brilliant debut, Martel constructs her narrative from quotidian incidents, myriad comings and goings, and a cacophony of voices competing for attention.

The characters are almost all members of an extended middle-class family, strapped for cash and crowded into houses crumbling from the dampness. The film's title (translated as The Swamp) refers literally to the terrain on which La Mandragora, the summer house that is the film's central location, is built—and metaphorically, to the collective family psyche in which individual members are trapped. It's also the name of the small town where Tali (Mercedes Moran), the most sympathetic adult in the film, lives with her husband and four young children. Tali's alcoholic cousin, Mecha (Graciela Borges), presides over La Mandragora in a drunken stupor; when she is rushed to the hospital (she falls on her wine glass and nearly bleeds to death), Tali's plan for a quiet summer is disrupted. Mecha and her husband are abusive drunks and their teenage sons are just as mean. Closer in temperament to Tali, their daughter Momi (Sofia Bertolotto) is made miserable by the departure of her best friend, Isabel (Andrea Lopez), the family's Indian servant, who silently suffers all their verbal abuse but balks at the sexual advances of Momi's older brother, José (Juan Cruz Bordeu)

Martel dispenses with the niceties of exposition, throwing us into this morass of frustration and anger, and leaving us, like the characters, to figure out on our own who's doing what to whom and who's to be trusted or not. The characters may not always be clearly delineated, but the ambience is detailed and rich. La Ciénaga opens with the family lounging around La Mandragora's brackish swimming pool. The handheld camera moves in, not on faces, but on bits of bodies (here a flabby middle-aged belly, there a young muscular shoulder), on thick blue glasses filled with wine and ice, on ancient plastic lawn chairs that look like animal skeletons as they're dragged across the muddy patio. The scene is visceral to the point of suffocation, and ominous as well, thanks to an audio track dense with the sounds of cicadas, thunder, and sudden rain. But if the world of La Mandragora is disturbing in its hyperreality, the world outside is even stranger and more incomprehensible. The children frighten one another with stories of dogs revealed to be cat-eating African rats, and the entire province is mesmerized by reported sightings of the Virgin Mary atop a water tower.

While Mecha and Tali are the film's most fleshed-out characters, the overall point of view is closer to that of Momi (and indeed, Martel has acknowledged the film is based on memories of her own family). In a debut feature that's assured in every aspect, Martel's direction of the younger members of her cast is particularly notable. When the kids are on the screen, La Ciénaga seems closer to documentary than fiction, as tumultuous, tender, and horrifying as real life caught on the fly.
Amy Taubin, The Village Voice

In Spanish:

La ciénaga no es sólo un elocuente nombre para designar el entorno geográfico y climático que envuelve la finca donde pasan el verano las dos familas, al igual que también lo son la población de Rey Muerto y la residencia de La Mandrágora. La ciénaga es además una excelente metáfora para expresar el ambiente corrompido, enfermizo, asfixiante, en el que estos insectos humanos están atrapados, como la fauna moradora de una charca, entre el barro de la pasividad, la inercia, la abulia y la resignación. Hay una secuencia al principio de la película, en la que una vaca, sumergida hasta la cabeza en el lodazal que ha provocado la lluvia, intenta salir a tierra firme. Su muerte es prácticamente segura. Inmediatamente después, vemos a los adultos estirados al sol en sus hamacas, ebrios de vino, sus cuerpos inertes, abandonados a la desidia estival, junto a la piscina llena de agua sucia y hojas, pútrida desde hace días. Esta comparación es un buen ejemplo de ese paralelismo que la película intenta exponer, con la diferencia de que mientras que el animal todavía lucha por sobrevivir, ellos ya no lo hacen.

La ciénaga, largometraje de la debutante Lucrecia Martel, es ante todo un excelente fresco de la sociedad argentina -con sus prejuicios, sus creencias y sus distintos submundos-, y un interesante retablo de este grupo familiar sumido en su propia y agonizante rutina. Una película de esperanzas rotas y sueños frustrados que mueren en el mismo momento en que ven la luz. Una película, en definitiva, sobre el tedio existencial.