La Ciénaga: Fill in the blank

Before you see La Ciénaga, you hear it. The beginning of Lucrecia Martel’s 2001 film acquaints us not with a plot or characters, but with sound – the scraping of chairs, the clinking of glasses, the relentless swells of rain. Situated in the noise is one of my all-time favorite movies: a bizarre critique of family, class and stagnancy.

Utter lifelessness is the default state of every character in Martel's ensemble, an Argentinian family living in their country home for the summer. The wealthy family sleepwalks through life, unperturbed when Mecha, the matriarch, cuts herself on already-drained wine glasses. This accident, rather unceremonious, is the closest Martel gets to a real plot. In fact, nothing in this film seems to rouse its characters from their sunbathing. It is precisely this dysfunction that makes La Ciénaga so compelling. Fixed in repose, the family languidly nurses their wounds, doing nothing to avoid obtaining more. All the while, sound, framing, and blocking act as my favorite characters, serving to critique the house from its interior. La Ciénaga is demonstrative of everything I love about Martel. In her feature debut, she dares to dismiss the traditional narrative structure, entrusting the story to her unique cinematography.

Discomfort lingers in La Ciénaga like humidity in the air. The family exists in constant proximity to danger, sporting injuries and wielding guns with an alarming nonchalance. The older generation never strays far from their alcohol and poolside chairs. The teens lay in bed together, far too comfortable in their intimacy. Any semblance of movement in the house can be attributed to Isabel, the family's teenage servant. Isabel's job is, quite literally, thankless. Mecha constantly accuses her of stealing from the house, hurling baseless imputations, even as she tends to Mecha's bleeding chest.

The only family member who doesn't meet Isabel with contempt is Momi, Mecha's fifteen-year-old daughter, who is infatuated with the girl. "Thank you God, for giving me Isabel," she whispers to no one in particular. The pairing isn't wholesome but perverse. Momi peers at Isabel through windows, distressed whenever she's not the target of her attention. You can't help but feel Isabel's irritation at Momi's unabated physicality. At every chance she gets, she drapes her body over Isabel's, her smothering nature as tactile as it is psychological.

Despite the spats Momi and Mecha have over her treatment, the two are equally culpable in Isabel's depersonalization. To Momi, she is an object of affection, to Mecha, one of servitude. Isabel's autonomy is contentious to both of these notions. Their intentions become clear when Isabel tries to assert her autonomy – “party girl,” they both hiss at her.

Perhaps the only likable character, Isabel demonstrates the extent to which class perpetuates the narrative — or lack thereof. The family is able to remain static because they can afford to. The only thing preventing them from total self-destruction is the labor of people like Isabel. Martel's work addresses political tension through a character-based ecosystem, taking down what she deems the "triumph of decadence" in the wake of the Argentinian great depression and subsequent wealth gap. In La Ciénaga, decadence doesn’t triumph as much as it suffocates, transforming the family into sluggish zombies, neither willing nor able to prevent their own decay. 

Martel’s cinematography adds to the film’s palpable sense of unease. Shots are framed through windows, shower curtains, and over shoulders. The camera is close to the point of intrusion, yet never comfortable enough to be familiar. What plays out in such shots only heightens the voyeuristic nature, as all too often, Martel’s characters are doing nothing at all. It adds a layer of foreboding to the moments she does choose to focus on – cousins sharing a too-small bed, brother and sister dancing cheek to cheek. What’s even more troubling is what Martel doesn’t show. Scenes seem to imply potential risk, yet never fully commit to it, the camera tactfully shying away at crucial moments. In these instances, Martel’s audio has the space to shine. The gaps in La Ciénaga are deliberate creations by Martel, as are the sounds she uses to fill them. In one scene, a group of children hunt in the mountains, unsupervised as they dart in front of each others’ lines of fire. In an extreme long shot of the mountain, a gunshot is heard but not seen. Martel calls upon her audience to fill in the blanks, and the result only amplifies the eerieness. 

Freud's unheimlich, or the uncanny, is clearly a big player in La Ciénaga. Martel disregards the classic suggestion to show and not tell, opting instead to do neither. Her scenes are strategically arranged, beginning in the midst of the action and cutting before any resolution. With this, La Ciénaga carries an unshakable sense of non-belonging, as though even us viewers are intruding upon the story. 

If you haven't had enough of me paraphrasing Mark Fisher on this blog, allow me to include this quote from his book, The Weird and the Eerie:

"The eerie concerns the most fundamental metaphysical questions one could pose, questions to do with existence and non-existence: 'Why is there something here when there should be nothing? Why is there nothing here when there should be something?' The unseeing eyes of the dead; the bewildered eyes of an amnesiac — these provoke a sense of the eerie, just as surely an abandoned village or a stone circle do."

Or, as the less convoluted David Oubiña puts it,

“Behind the apparently chaotic accumulation of characters and situations, Martel treats filmmaking as a subtractive process and the film as a reduction, though what she excludes remains in the suburbs of the image, troubling what we see.”

It is through this subtractive process that Martel is able to pull back the curtain on the Argentinian elite. Her unconventional approach to filmmaking grants a level of agency, provoking viewers to answer to the negative space. Under her insinuation, the worst case scenario often seems the most likely. The gravity of La Ciénaga succeeds by virtue of mere suggestion and subtle innuendos. For Martel, every detail invites catastrophe, yet nothing induces it. Like thunder threatening a storm, Martel’s film serves as a dire warning of what goes unseen.

✽ ✽ ✽

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Note: This is a modified excerpt from a longer essay I wrote on Argentinian film. I've been meaning to blog about La Ciénaga for what feels like forever. I couldn't help but include my thoughts here, though I wanted to spare you some of my more didactic paragraphs. Sorry to any Freud haters.