La Ciénaga (2001)

Highly Overrated But Still Good

Fresh and Exciting

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

Although I seem to have had higher expectations than I thought, the movie is super entertaining.

The pool doesn't work and it hasn't been working for a couple of years. This is a metaphor in the film, La Ciénaga, meaning "the bog" in English. As in a bog, everything gets stuck, which is also the case with the Argentine economy. It has been in a slump for some time now. The summer estate pool is filthy, the light bulbs are flickering and drunk grey-hairs are walking around. The parents are aging. The father is an adulterer. The mother is a pity party. The teenage girls are curious and the boys are always playing in the swamp. La Ciénaga is a one of a series of three for the director Martel. All three of the films are depictions or memories of Martel's childhood in the northwestern part of Argentina. La Ciénaga depicts a memory of her upper middle class family staying in their dilapidated summer home, La Mandrogora, during one of the many Argentine financial crises.Stuck and miserable, Doña Marcel stutters around with her scarred bust, seemingly permanent sunglasses and vino cup topped with ice as the summer melts her away into another slippery alcoholic slope. She is empty. Her husband is an adulterer who just dyed his hair black for the Carnaval. Too bad he is too drunk himself to accomplish much. She, on the other hand, is melting away in unhappiness. Looking to the Indian servants for support only ends with accusations, racists remarks and an endless ringing telephone.There are Catholic references throughout the story. These wrap together the end of the film, when Momi, Marcel's teenage daughter, loses all faith and hope. Her best friend, and also live-in Indian servant, Isabella, leaves the family and her job to live with Perro, her lover. Martel visually alludes to, but never reveals in dialog, that Isabella becomes pregnant, which is why she left with Perro. Momi is mortified. She goes into town to see the sighting of the Virgen del Carmen; a symbol of hope and faith to the Argentine Catholics.The casting of the film is fair. In my opinion, it failed in doing its job and did not make it easy for me to believe that the Marcel's are a family. Perhaps the actors were selected for their abilities and not because the they could pass as a family. The production design and camera work was excellent. Martel did not fall short of making me feel as though I was in a sticky swamp. I definitely felt the sweat of the swamp, it was sucking me in little by little.I did not particularly empathize with the characters. I did not experience a connection to any of them. The overtone of bigotry towards the Indians, overlaid with a story about a woman who is trying to get a grip on her life and her bourgeois tendencies, detached me from the family. I did not care about any of them. If Martel's mission was to leave me stuck in the bog with the family's misery for an hour and a half she succeeded.Martel's most notable scene is when Doña Marcel trips on some towels and falls at the pool, resulting in open lacerations on her chest. As well as when the boys are hunting and they come across a cow that is stuck in the bog. The pacing of the film is executed very well during Doña Marcel accident. Although, I was not interested in the story of the film, I did feel many emotional beats. The film does not pay off for me in the end, though I could have missed the sighting of the Virgen.

Argentine filmmaker Lucrecia Martel wrote and directed this impressively rich and atmospheric look at moral dissipation among Argentina's upper classes. Set in northwestern Argentina, on a dilapidated country estate, the movie chronicles the quotidian malaise of an Argentine family, their cousins, servants, and the nearby town.Lushly and patiently filmed, the story follows the elder adults as they drink themselves into a stupor alongside their decrepit pool while their children cavort through the gloomy rooms of the country manor, killing off the idle hours of their summer holiday. Ignored by their parents, who are anxious to drown their own withered and broken relationships in alcohol, the children drive without licenses, race through the forest with shotguns, drink and dance at town parties.Martel's effortless style captures the aimlessness of their lives and casts an especially harsh light on the conflicted relationship between a small moneyed population with European ancestry and the indigent servant class of indigenous locals. The movie's languorous pace beautifully matches the hot and muggy atmosphere that lays like a blanket over the estate and its bored inhabitants...

this movie is not for morons. it's a bit, you know, slow. It's a bit, you know, weird. It might even make you have to think. The bottom line is, look at your list of favorite films and if, for the most part, they're completely predictable, formulaic and obvious, do not waste your time with La Cienaga. You're just gonna feel annoyed by it. I don't care if you think you're smart (in reference to someone's comment about "even people at Berkley walked out" -- berkley's got its fair share of stagnant dolts, trust me). Be honest with yourself; because this film is pretty merciless, and if you have any weaknesses in comprehension, empathy, openmindedness or imagination, you're gonna feel really bored/uncomfortable watching this. The only fault I have with this film is that it has no sense of humor. But for some reason I don't miss it here. It's a mood piece that doesn't try very hard to please.

La Cienaga is one of those movies that you watch and then you rub your eyes either to wake up or to come to your senses. The beginning was nice as it shows two families sunbathing by a nasty stagnant pool, then a drunken lady falls and cuts her chest, no one really cares and then her children help her, I thought this beginning was quite surreal so I proceeded to adjust myself in my leather seat, then it all went wrong, the movie gets flat, the plot goes nowhere, and the unhappy characters mainly fly aimlessly in their misery, there is the drunken mother, the useless husbands, the one eye kid, the other children who enjoy shooting animals and two brothers that have the hots for each other. Visually this movie succeeds and in a way I'd venture to say that maybe the so-called 'indians' of Argentina live like this among alcoholic drinks and trips to Bolivia to shop for school supplies, but at the end of the film I just thought, what do I care? I just wasted 100 minutes watching this.