La Cienaga (film group essay)

La Cienaga


　

　
It’s hot in the foothills of the Andes Mountains. But it’s even warmer down in the city with the unpromising name La Cienaga ("The Swamp"). Mecha and Gregorio have a swimming pool at their decaying country estate, La Mandragola ("The Mandrake"). Tali is "almost Mecha’s cousin" and she decides to pay visit with her husband and four or five small children. It rains incessantly and the servants at La Mandragola are surly. Thunder sounds in the nearby mountains and the kids make expeditions into the cloud forest to shoot at a cow that has died in the mire of a nearby swamp. The swimming pool is so filthy that you can’t see someone submerged in its putrefying waters. The heat has made everyone irritable and Tali suggests that the women drive across the nearby mountain border with Bolivia. School supplies are cheap in Bolivia and the summer vacation will soon be over with the kids returning to the classes.

This is the situation in Lucrecia Martel’s debut feature film, La Cienaga (2001). Entangled, unhappy families immured in their remote country estates are crucial to the plots of several of Anton Chekhov’s plays, most notably Uncle Vanya, and Martel’s picture stands squarely within a rich film tradition of movies chronicling a disastrous weekend in the country – the most famous of these films in Renoir’s The Rules of the Game.

　



Lucrecia Martel

Martel has said that the people and milieu in La Cienaga derive from her memories of childhood in Salta, Argentina – the city that is called La Cienaga (or "the Swamp") in the film. She was born in Salta in 1966. She attended three film schools in Buenos Aires but didn’t graduate from any of them – she recalls that the schools kept going "bankrupt" before she was able to get her degree.

She worked in television for several years and produced an award-winning short subject, Rey Muerto ("Dead King") in 1995. Decisive in her career was the support of the producer Lita Stantic, one of the most important advocates for the new Argentinan cinema that emerged after the so-called "Dirty War" and the displacement of the ruling military junta. Stantic produced La Cienaga, Martel’s debut feature, and her second and third films as well, The Holy Girl (2004) and The Headless Woman (2008).

The Holy Girl is also shot entirely in Salta. The film involves a teenage girl who is intensely religious. The girl conceives a plan to save the soul of a doctor attending a medical conference at her mother’s hotel. (The film stars many of the players from La Cienaga including Mercedes Moran, who played Tali in the earlier film, as the girl’s mother.) The movie is an extraordinary mixture of Catholic piety and feverish adolescent sexuality. The Headless Woman, also shot in Salta and Salta province, is a disturbing psychological thriller. A woman hits something while driving on a lonely country road. She believes that she has killed a dog. She is traveling to seek medical attention and stays overnight in Salta. A small boy is missing in the impoverished village near the place where the crash happened. Ultimately, it seems that the boy was killed by a hit and run driver. The protagonist is tormented by guilt and fear, but nothing links her to the accident.

The rediscovery of the novel Zama by the Argentine writer Antonio di Benedetto was one of the remarkable stories in international literature in 2016. Benedetto’s Zama was republished under the imprint of New York Review of Books and it achieved international acclaim. The book involves a weary bureaucrat trapped in Asuncion, Paraguay in the 19^th century. Originally published in Buenos Aires in 1956, the book was well-regarded in Argentina but unknown elsewhere. Apparently, Martel is at work adapting the book for the screen – this will be an important project with international implications. Martel’s movies, though well-reviewed internationally, have not been widely distributed in the United States – the first of her films to be seen outside of a few large cities in the United States was The Headless Woman. That picture received reasonable distribution because it was marketed through the Spanish director Almodovar’s distribution company.



Some Observations about La Cienaga

Fundamentally, La Cienaga is about accidents. (This theme is also crucial to The Headless Woman.) An accident exposes us an aspect of the world that is literally sickening – there are things that we can’t control that have the capacity to destroy us. Life is a wager and, sometimes, we are on the losing end of that bet. Of course, some accidents, in hindsight, are avoidable – in fact, almost all accidents share this characteristic: if we consider the concatenation of events leading to the accident, the calamity could have been averted at any number of times. Thus, accidents have the uncanny aspect of both being unforeseeable calamities and, also, mishaps that, with due diligence could have been avoided. The severe cuts that Mecha sustains in the opening scene beside the pool display these elements of the concept of the accidental – of course, everyone is staggering drunk and Mecha’s fall, to some extent, is her own fault. But the consequences of that fall go far beyond Mecha’s negligence – in fact, she almost bleeds to death and requires a transfusion from her daughter. This opening sequence has the squishy, nasty, and brutal character of a real accident – what is discounted at first turns out to be serious and the consequences of the cuts inflicted on Mecha go far beyond anyone’s rational control. Mecha and her drunken husband are not in control of their world.

After this opening salvo, the audience views La Cienaga as a kind of horror film, as a high-brow variant on Final Destination, a picture in which a group of teenagers dies one after another in gory mishaps. We are continuously expecting the next potentially lethal mishap – the adults are so drunk, that the unlicensed teenage girl has to drive her mother cross-country to the clinic in La Cienaga. One of the little boys has already shot out one of his eyes and the kids carry weapons in the jungle to take potshots at the animals that they encounter, including a cow that has accidentally wandered into some quicksand. The unlicensed girl is continuously forced to drive. When one of the teenagers dives into the pool, the camera turns its deadpan eye on the filthy and opaque water in the pond, recording a few bubbles drifting up to the surface – will the girl ever resurface? Mecha’s son gets punched in a drunken brawl in which knives are brandished. The kids all go down to a sinister-looking dam where they chop wildly at the water with machete knives – someone surely is going to get badly cut. Then, the dam’s spillways apparently open and powerful blasts of water spray the kids. We flinch when Tali sets up a ladder to climb up to put some flower pots on the ledge surrounding her little courtyard, the place where her toddler son plays and a small tortoise ambles about. At every point, the characters seem poised on the edge of a violent encounter with fate.

The dominance of the accidental over the characters in La Cienaga is not surprising since everyone seems to be half catatonic with the sultry Christmas time heat and the vast amounts of wine that the adults consume. People lounge around in bed, vainly nudging their bedmates for some sign that they are conscious. Everyone seems helpless and forlorn. It’s pretty clear that the road trip to Bolivia that the women plan will never happen. The characters can scarcely stir themselves to get out of bed. There is something profoundly South American about the film’s suffocating ambience of negligence, torpor, and humid, sweaty familial intimacy – it’s always siesta time and the improvements in the world that might avoid the accidents waiting to befall us can be made manana. I have heard South Americans themselves characterize their countries as the "the land of manana" – meaning, we will get to the problem tomorrow, that is, never at all.

Lucrecia Martel affects big pink glasses, the kind of spectacles worn by aggressive lady realtors, and she has not made any other movies with the density of observation in La Cienaga. The picture gives you the impression that it is one of those compilation pieces into which the director has poured a lifetime of memories and disappointments. Argentinan cinema is relentlessly political, obsessively concerned with redressing grievances suffered during the previous 20 years of murderous military junta rule. But Martel isn’t even remotely concerned with that subject. Instead, she works Renoir’s vein – the infinitely rich subject of minor domestic tragedies. As in The Rules of the Game, where we see the servants commenting on the foibles of their masters, Martel shows us all elements of her society – the fading alcoholic gentry, the aggressive urban housewife, the tough street kids in Salto, and long-suffering Indian servants. Her milieu in this film is disappointment and regret – Mecha’s fall triggers recognition of her disappointment in her marriage: she calls the scarcely sentient Jose "a pig" and exiles him from the bedroom that will be her refuge for the rest of her life. Tali seems happily married but her husband, nonetheless, silently subverts her one effort at seeking a little distance from her clamorous family – he buys the school supplies and, thus, cancels Tali’s wish to go to Bolivia. Accidents cost lives – the Indian servant girl is apparently pregnant; her resignation from work at La Mandragola is presented in a code that Mecha instantly understands. It’s pretty clear that the father of her child, the thuggish street kid whose only property seems to be his bicycle is not worthy of her. Undoubtedly, the pregnancy is a mistake, an accident. And, of course, at the end of the movie, the little boy who is associated with the African rat (his mouth seems to be eerily crowded with different sets of teeth) falls from the ladder that he has been told not to touch. We can imagine the pet tortoise slowly ambling by his unconscious body. The only ray of light in this gloomy landscape is the fact that Mecha’s dissolute son, fearing, it seems, his attraction, with Tali’s oldest daughter, returns to his (apparently half-Indian) mistress in Buenos Aires. We have seen this young man wrestling with the younger girl and, even, invading her shower to wash off his filthy feet – there is an obvious attraction between the older boy and the girl. (I equate Tali’s oldest daughter with Martel and think that the film’s peculiar tone of stifled desire and squalor arises from the director’s ambivalence about the young man – Tali’s oldest daughter, Lucrecia Martel’s surrogate, I think, clearly has a crush on the boy just as Mecha’s daughter seems to be in love with Indian servant girl. But this is puppy love, a Summer thing – although its Winter in Argentina -- an affair that is not supposed to last and it’s something that Martel can nostalgically regret while being happy that nothing ever really happened.)

Lucrecia Martel has one of the rarest capacities in the arts – a great and majestic "negative capacity". By this I mean that she sets up the situation and, then, allows it to develop without intervening to install meanings in the events that she portrays. She is willing to allow things to stand for themselves – everything isn’t integrated into some authorial (or directorial) quest for meaning. She makes us work to see the connections but never forces our attention and never requires that we accept any specific ideological or thematic understanding of her material. The most startling thing about the movie, as shown in the scenes at the dam, the dances in Salta, and the sudden spontaneous dance in La Mandragola is that notwithstanding the feelings of intense regret and disappointment that the film embodies, the characters in La Cienaga are, more or less, happy. It is, after all, home sweet home.