La Ciénaga

LA CIÉNAGA   ***1/2

Lucrecia Martel

2001

IDEA:  The families of two friends come together when the wealthy matriarch of one of the families sustains an injury.

BLURB:  In European and postcolonial cinemas, indictments of bourgeois complacency are ubiquitous. Somewhat paradoxically, these films typically center their white, upper-class characters, usually and dubiously at the expense of the lower-class, ethnic minorities they subjugate and exploit. They also have the tendency of figuring the acedia of the bourgeoisie in corporeal terms, with characters swallowed by lassitude as long, impassive takes convey a sense of encroaching spiritual atrophy. Argentine director Lucrecia Martel’s feature debut, La Ciénaga, doesn’t totally buck this template, but it does spike and complicate it through formidable aesthetic and narrative ingenuity. While the swamp of the title is a handy and apt metaphor, alluding to both the family’s clogged, turbid swimming pool and their own cloistered emotional stagnancy, Martel is far too innovative in her portraiture to rely for effect on obvious symbols. Instead, she tears at the expected grammar we’ve become accustomed to when exploring the bourgeois world: in place of compositional depth and unity are flatness and fragmentation, while sudden ellipses splinter continuity and narrative cause-and-effect. We must work, even during the most expository scenes, to deduce the characters’ relationships, whose natures we are prompted to reevaluate at the most seemingly insignificant gesture or line. Martel’s disorienting strategies suggest class-based inertia in a different, maybe more potent way, not merely as indifference or physical malaise but as dazed, inattentive aimlessness (all those injuries!), as ineffectualness and borderline incoherence. What are these people about? Thankfully, within this mire, La Ciénaga finds some time for its belittled domestic worker, Isabela, who’s the film’s only real emotional anchor outside of audience surrogate Momi. She certainly deserves her own movie; at least in this one, she’s spared from drowning in Martel’s clammy, self-cannibalizing bourgeois bog.