La Ciénaga

La Ciénaga (2001)
Director: Lucrecia Martel
Actors: Graciela Borges, Mercedes Morán, Martín Adjemián

Synopsis: Mecha (Graciela Borges), a middle-class Argentine matriarch, suffers an accident while at the family’s summer retreat. While holed up in her bedroom ‘recovering’, her close and extended family play out a series of fraught and excruciating mini-dramas around her.

Review: “Poor Tom, that eats the swimming frog, the toad, the tadpole, the wall newt, and the water; that in the fury of his heart, when the foul fiend rages, eats cow dung for salads, swallows the old rat and the ditch-dog, drinks the green mantle of the standing pool”. (Edgar, King Lear, Act 3, Scene 4)

Rewatching Lucrecia Martel’s masterly debut feature, the above excerpt from ‘King Lear’ seemed strangely pertinent in capturing the abject decline that La Ciénaga’s bourgeois Argentine family have fallen into – symbolised best by the stagnant swimming pool, usually an emblem of affluence, they all torporifically lounge around for days on end during one long, hot summer.

This sense of stultifying decadence is captured to a T by Martel. It’s a reminder that as well as being a brilliant technician and visual artist, Martel is an exemplary writer too. There is a real novelistic quality to La Ciénaga, from its extended metaphors of a social class in decline, to its delicately handled ensemble narrative. Where the film seems to have ambled along – like many a Martel film – the final act where the class, gender and racial fault-lines all intersect reveals the hand of an expert storyteller throughout.

As ever with Martel, her film is also a cinematographic treat. It’s one of the more effective portrayals of ennui I’ve seen on screen, and Martel’s sound design is disarmingly smart – lots of silence juxtaposed to the screaming kids, the growling dogs and the feckless gunshots from the young boys that all act as a harbinger for the encroaching chaos entering the fragile homestead.

I’ve also never seen a film make such psychic use of beds. Tangentially, I wrote about the metaphorical transcendence of Tarkovsky’s use of beds for my Master’s thesis, and while Martel’s co-opting of the imagery is slightly more matter-of-fact, it still beautifully underlines the apathetic malaise the central bourgeois Argentine family are falling into – and how a retreat to the bedroom also represents a retreat from the worries of an ever troubling reality; a descent into wilful amnesia. (July 2018)