Quest Status: 747 / 1000
TSPDT Rank #615
Director Lucrecia Martel said in an interview about this film, her debut feature, that she wanted the viewer to feel uncomfortable from the start, and to always be unsure what was going to happen next. Well, mission accomplished. La Ciénaga starts with a highly stylized and unsettling opening sequence, with a group of middle-aged drunks lounging around a pool and drinking heavily, dragging their chairs loudly over concrete tiles while gunshots sound in the nearby mountains. This surreal opening provides the set-up for an accident that introduces us to an extended family with more than its fair share of issues - mostly hinted at - but child neglect, alcoholism, incest, mental illness, and racism are all fair game in this free-floating tale of festering familial decay.
The title is the name of the town where the film takes place, a thinly-veiled take on Martel's hometown of Salta. This name, which translates as "The Swamp," is a fitting metaphor for both the family seen in the film and Martel's narrative style. Everything we see in the film is only the scummy surface of a larger swamp. It could be a metaphor for degenerate upper-class families like this one, or for Argentine society as a whole. No matter how you look at it, everything in this film is putrid and rotting. There's not a likeable character in sight, but it is a beautiful film in its own unflinching way.
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