Everything and nothing happens in La Cienaga, the debut feature from Argentinean director Lucrecia Martel (The Headless Woman). Spanning the space of one aimless summer, this avant-garde drama captures the boredom and the heat for one extended family forced together by circumstance as life changes and petty concerns swirl all about.
The translation of the title is "The Swamp", and there may be no better word to describe the sticky bog that creeps over its characters' ankles, literally and metaphorically. Even the narrative stalls out in the muck: Save for the alarming events that bookend the film, nothing much happens beyond suggestion and observation, apart from a steady, patient accumulation of minor details. With an anthropologist's eye for behavior, Martel plants her camera in a crowded bourgeois estate in northwestern Argentina and watches the decaying lives of two families rotting in a provincial backwater. Echoes of Luis Bunuel's social comedies are unmistakable, but Martel examines the situation from a greater remove, relying mainly on subtle touches in the framing and on the dense soundtrack. In that sense, La Cienaga could be called a pointillist movie, with all the pleasures and frustrations that description implies.
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