79 | 4 stars | A-
Director: Lucrecia Martel
Cast: Graciela Borges, Mercedes Morán, Andrea López
Synopsis: Members of two Argentine families, bourgeois and self-pitying, go about their daily routines.
Genre: Drama
Key awards: Berlin International Film Festival – Alfred Bauer Award
Runtime: 103 minutes
Language: Spanish
Singapore rating: PG
Admittedly it can be off-putting. At over an hour and forty minutes, La Ciénaga feels bloated at times, with simply too many narratives and characters interspersed, too many ticks and nuances alien to the foreign viewer. Watch it twice. It becomes more digestible, its images more biting, its stories more remarkable.
The directorial debut of Lucrecia Martel, a contemporary female director from Argentina, La Ciénaga is a sudden plunge into the rotting lives of the middle-classes. The middle-classes don’t seem to have anything to do at all. They drink, sleep, and wander aimlessly around. Couples cheat and lament on their sorry state. Boys and girls frolic around but with a similar lack of direction. There is no plot.
These people are not rotten to the core. Nor are their families, really. They sit and lie around, yet they do so not so much to exalt a sense of hopelessness and foreboding, but as if waiting for something to happen, a cataclysmic occurrence, an apocalyptic event, and so on. There are traces of this on the horizon. In the mountains, children play with hunting rifles, carelessly standing in the way of each other. One of the kids has one eye bandaged from an accident – is he going to lose his other one? At a river, everyone stands waist-deep holding long sharp knives in preparation of a catch. As the fish scramble, the knives rain down, ominous and dangerous.
Central to the film are two women, Mecha (Graciela Borges) and her cousin Tali (Mercedes Morán). Mecha and her family stay in a decrepit summer residence, La Mandrágora (Spanish for “mandrake”); Tali and hers reside in Salta, a small provincial town close by and also Martel’s hometown. Mecha is in her fifties, with a husband, Gregorio, and several teenage children. Tali is similarly endowed, but her children are small and noisy.
Mecha sustains a fall and remains confined to her bed. She is unwilling to anything else except complain and whine about her life. Her husband once cheated on her with their son’s partner; this partner has arranged to pay a visit to the estate. Her daughter, Momi, she views as rude and ungrateful, a “little savage”. The maid, Isabel (Andrea López), is a native Amerindian whom the family’s adults view with distrust and contempt. She steals towels, supposedly, and is often missing when most needed.
Tali arranges a visit to Mecha, accompanied by her children. Her own home is dense, humid, claustrophobic, a place of dreaded familial responsibility. She has to look after the children, tending to their wounds and requests, while Rafael, her husband, works. Small wonder that a trip down to the countryside works marvels – there, the children mingle in the pool together, the adults without a care in the world.
Time, perhaps, to shed light on the title. Known in English as The Swamp, La Ciénaga presents both a literal swamp and a metaphorical one. The literal swamp is a pond of stagnant water in Mecha’s residence, present in the opening scene of the film. The adults drag their chairs along the ground, never once minding the jarringly screechy sounds that produces. They sit by the pool and sip alcohol. A violent heat seems to crash down on them; they appear comatose, indifferent to their reality, moving around with great routine and inertia.
Martel’s most striking ability features here: the fusion of visual and sound. These two are the film’s most significant narrative devices, in the absence of a regular, coherent narrative. The footage is hand-held at times, almost in the vein of the Dogme 95 movement, capturing the inner spaces of the house and its inhabitants with a sort of voyeuristic intimacy we feel imposed on us. Sound, meanwhile, is astonishingly designed; the wine glasses clink loudly and in a brittle fashion, the ominous use of gunshots and thunderstorms without the corresponding visual stimuli add to a grim portent of what may come.
The swamp of Martel’s carefully crafted universe is depicted in all its filth and muddy glory. The adults are meandering, incompetent slabs of overgrown flesh, wasting away. Casual racism is no longer the question – Mecha’s hostility towards her indigenous servants is openly promulgated alongside an elitist feeling of disgust. (Is this attitude justified? Maybe, maybe not – a cyclical animosity between the various class and social groups is allowed to fester, always beneath the surface and never into open rebellion, lurking as a crocodile would in its swamp.) Incestuous undertones are uncomfortably brought up, and never given explanatory relief. As Mecha recovers in the hospital from her fall, her sole request I for Momi to bring her a particular set of attire in order to look presentable.
La Ciénaga is not a feel-good movie. It does not satirise its subjects, but presents them as they are. The pain we feel is the pain that comes from our identification with some of their traits and behaviours. We may be equally guilty of apathy as some of them, looking to the television as news reports of the Virgin Mary circulate. A joyless, consumerist lifestyle awaits the silent and listless characters of the film, the primary beneficiaries of economic growth and social upgrading. Could the same not be said of us?