La Cienaga

La Cienaga (2001) is a notable film in the Argentine New Cinema, a picture said to embody the esthetics of that movement.  The picture, unknown to me before Criterion's recent issue of this CD, is both fascinating and frightening -- as in films by Michael Haneke, the Austrian auteur, the viewer watches the movie in a state of perpetual tension and unease:  everything is falling apart and, it seems, that in every scene someone is threatened with the risk of suffering a serious, accidental injury.  The movie takes place in the country near a fictional city, La Cienaga (the unprepossessing name means "the swamp") in a northern province of Argentina. (The place is actually director Lucrecia Martel's hometown of Saltas.)  The city seems poor and most of its citizens are Indians.  This is the kind of place where upper middle-class Argentine make excursions to Bolivia to buy cheap school supplies for their numerous children.  The weather is apparently sweltering -- it is always raining and the humidity is so high that the film contains no sex; although everyone is always just about on the verge of copulation it's too hot for intercourse.  The film's narrative is oblique and, on the first glance, the picture appears to have no plot -- it's just a mélange of events tied together very loosely by the two main characters' plan to cross the nearby Bolivian border on their shopping expedition, an excursion thwarted by the overly solicitous husband of one of the female protagonists who simply buys the school supplies wholesale, thus eliminating the need for the trip.  (This man is so practical and unimaginative that he actually believes that the women's quixotic shopping expedition is motivated by the upcoming school year and the need to buy supplies -- in fact, the women are desperate to have an excuse to escape, if for only a couple days, the swamp in which they are trapped.)  The film is exhausting to watch for several reasons -- first, the movie's tone of ominous menace (someone is going to get hurt) sustained throughout the entire film is fatiguing; second, the film is not minimalist -- to the contrary, it provides the viewer with a surfeit of information:  the film's frames are packed with children, dogs, and there is always something going on at the margins of the image:  one of the families in the movie owns a tortoise, for instance, and the little animal is often shown plodding across the bottom of the frame.  There must be 20 characters in the film, all interacting melodramatically, and the network of relationships between the people depicted in the movie is difficult to decipher:  as an example, Mecha's handsome son, Jose, is having an affair with a woman named Mercedes; it is hinted that Mercedes may once have been the mistress of Mecha's feckless, alcoholic husband, Gregorio -- Mercedes' impending visit to the household at the Mandrake, the name of the country estate where Mecha and Gregorio live, is always threatened but, like the trip to Bolivia, doesn't materialize.  Jose also seems to have incestuous desires toward his sister, Momi, the teenage girl whose perspective motivates much of the picture.  Mecha, who is a faded beauty and also alcoholic, has a best friend named Tali, "some kind of a cousin" someone says -- Tali is briskly efficient and it's her idea to undertake the shopping expedition, involving a dangerous border crossing, to Bolivia.  (It's Tali's husband, Rafaelo, who thwarts the whole adventure by purchasing the school supplies.)  Tali has a number of children most of them girls except for a little boy whose upper jaw is sprouting supernumerary teeth.  In this film, everyone is always getting cut and having to go to the doctor, a harried physician called "the Gringo," to get their wounds sutured.  The tone is established by the opening scene in which Mecha drunkenly falls by the side of her horrific swimming pool, a nasty grey-green lagoon on which fallen leaves are floating.  In the fall, Mecha slices open her cleavage so badly that she has to have a blood transfusion.  Mecha's husband, Gregorio, is zombie-drunk so that he can't drive her to the hospital in La Cienaga and so Momi, who is only fifteen and not a licensed driver, has to take her town -- Momi can't really drive and she backs the car over her mother's hydrangeas.  At the clinic, Mecha encounters Tali, who is there to have her little boy with the extra teeth sutured-up -- he fell off a counter.  Throughout the movie, we see adolescents swinging dangerous-looking machetes to kill catfish, little boys hunting with big shotguns, people riding bikes and cars in ways that seem dangerous -- the risk of serious injury is always haunting the film.  Indeed, one of Mecha's sons, Joaquin, has already had an eye shot out and one of theme's running through the film is a scheme to get a glass eye for his ruined eye-socket.  Given the hazards that exist in this world, it's no surprise that Mecha has taken to her bed.  Toward the end of the film, she has acquired a small freezer that she places at the foot of her bed:  the freezer will supply ice for her drinks so that she will not have to leave her bedroom.  (She has banished poor Gregorio to another part of the crumbling mansion).  The film is a kind of comedy in some respects, fraught with suggestions of horror -- there is a story about a lethal rat mistaken for a dog and the little boy with the anomalous teeth seems to be developing, perhaps, into some kind of a monster.  South American magical realism lurks around the edges of the film -- an opening shot of red peppers against a background of jungle is extraordinary and the Virgin has appeared in La Cienaga, preaching to the people from a shabby-looking concrete water tower. A swimming trip to a muddy pool at the foot of a dam ends with massive torrents of water suddenly blasting the kids from off-screen. At the end of the film, a mysterious singing voice heard through the ceiling of Tali's house precipitates the last of the various catastrophes that the film documents.  This movie, like its subject matter, seems to be a shambles, a semi-improvised mess, but upon closer consideration various themes emerge and there are rhymes in the imagery that create strange resonances.  Ladders are dangerous, gates won't reliably open, no one will answer the telephone, and when a little kid places a glass of water on a counter, he invariably sets it much too close to the edge of the counter.  Everyone is drunk all of the time and people always wake up in beds where they are not supposed to be.  This is an extraordinary film -- it hides more than it reveals but is infinitely suggestive (This is a picture that would benefit from being released with a good commentary track -- there's simply too much going on for the viewer to understand all of the picture's nuances and there are many references to Argentine customs that are opaque to North American viewers; inexplicably, however, Criterion has released the disk without the background information that would make this great film much more meaningful to its viewers.)