La Cienaga poster & wallpaper

Andrea Lopez, Daniel Valenzuela, Graciela Borges

Two large families--complete with middle-aged boozers, noisy children, servants and pets--spend a torpid summer together in a faded resort town in Northwest Argentina. The swimming pool is filthy, bro...( read more  read more... )ken glass litters the deck--from one drink too many, sullen teenagers abound, and the lush vegetation surrounding the house looks as though it's about to make its move. Soon the crowded, rough-and-tumble domestic situation strains everyone's nerves; repressed family mysteries are exposed and the tensions laid bare by the long, hot summer threaten to erupt into violence.

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79% liked it

970 ratings

Critics

86% liked it

36 critics

R, 1 hr. 40 min.

Directed by: Lucrecia Martel

Release Date: October 3, 2001

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DVD Release Date: February 1, 2005

Stats: 72 reviews

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Flixster Reviews (72)

  • mistershinobi
    July 25, 2009
    mistershinobi
    The endless meanings behind every single second of film are gorgeous to think about after seeing it and gorgeous to look at while they unfold in 100 beautifully shot and carefully directed minutes.

    Lucrecia Martel hit all the right notes with this 2001 quiet masterpiece and inf...( read more)luenced one of the most amazing styles in Latin American cinema this decade: nothing happens. Suddenly, movies about groups of friends doing nothing for a weekend and families coping with rough summers while falling into a spiral of decadence and silent violence became one of the most beautiful branches of filmmaking in Spanish. Some of them are obvious rip-offs from this one, the pioneer, but most of them were just honest tries to pay homage to a movie that opened many eyes in filmmaking.

    Flawless cinematography, awesome screenplay, marvelous subtle performances and precise direction. Haunting, sometimes scary, sometimes hilarious, it's hard to take it out of your mind after many days.

    You simply can't miss this one.
  • ebs90
    June 30, 2008
    ebs90
    La Cienaga is the story of two bourgeoise families on a summer vacation in their country house in Argentina. Alone, isolated from urban life, unavoidably close to each other, the family members face their own decadance as a group and push themselves, inentionally or not, to the t...( read more)he verge of complete domestic destruction. Nothing works: they don't understand each other, don't like each other, can't stand each other.

    The mother is sick, and so sick of life that she prefers to remain sick in bed rather than keep living like she used to. The father is an detached figure in a corner. The brothers and sisters are, of course, in the wake, the middle, or the end of adolescence, with all its respective problems and dilemmas. The other family contains a shallow, overworking mother, a taciturn, passive father, and their little children.

    The Swamp is crowded, and noisy; Lucrecia Martel perfectly translates the sticky and unconfortable sensation of humid hot weather, the smell of wet vegetation, dirty pools, brown-water rivers, and the phony cool of electric fans all over the place. All actors and actresses are excellent in their roles, and it's beautifully shot, making the most out of inanimate objects jus as well as characters doing superficial, day-to-day tasks, to create that unconfortable atmosphere of familiar-but-uncertain. Although it lacks a plot per se, there's an everpresent feeling that what is happening is leading someplace. Martel also masterfully creates sexual tension, loads of it, in a film where no sex takes place whatsoever, and where all the characters are, well, related. Regardless of whether it's awkward, Martel goes for it because it's real.

    La Cienaga a slow-paced, rambling study of the human condition that builds tension until the unavoidable ending. GREAT. One of the best Argentinian films I've seen.
  • littlecharmer1959
    December 12, 2008
    littlecharmer1959
    A very promising debut from Lucrecia Martel. No real plot but that doesn't matter when it's such a great study a family life. Beautifully shot also.
  • GringoTex
    August 14, 2009
    GringoTex
    I have never seen a more authentic representation of bourgeoisie vacation in Latin America, of the child/nanny relationship, or of a gaggle of kids. Lucrecia Martel is the Cassavetes/Truffaut of her time and place. She builds her entire narrative on the near-abstraction of faces ...( read more)and bodies (like Cassavetes) all tied up in the tender spaces of Truffaut.
  • ralch
    July 21, 2009
    ralch
    PAN AND SCAN. Efectiva y sutil alegoría de la decadencia burguesa argentina y de la existencia precaria del ser humano, en general. Su estética está muy bien definida y equilibrada. / Effective and subtle allegory of burgeois decadence in Argentina and of human beings' precarious...( read more) existence, in general. Its aesthetics are well defined and balanced.
  • Phonex
    January 18, 2009
    Phonex
    The title translates as ?the swamp,? but it?s also the name of the Argentinean city that serves as the film?s setting. In this sweltering backwater, two branches of the same large family are put back in contact when a pair of accidents lands a member of each in the clinic run by ...( read more)?the gringo,? a local doctor. One group ? a married couple with innumerable children and their constantly-present friends ? lives in the city, comfortably, but still scraping to get by. The other ? an heiress, her drunken husband, their innumerable children, and an indigenous housekeeper named Isabel ? pass the hours in a lavish but crumbling estate attained through a ridiculously complex series of gates near the mountains outside La Ciénaga. When the city family pays their relatives a visit at this estate, the repressed drama of La Ciénaga gets underway.

    And although there isn?t much of a plot, there?s plenty of this repressed drama; it rumbles under the surface of the proceedings like the thunder of the ever-threatening storms in the mountains nearby. Everything in La Ciénaga is tension, dysfunction, avoidance. But, just like those storms, this tension never quite breaks; it hangs in the air like the stifling heat and humidity, ever-present, everywhere.

    Rather than plotting her material, Martel presents us with vignettes from the day-to-day lives of this rich cast of characters, and her film?s seemingly desultory wandering mirrors the aimless lives it portrays seamlessly. (In fact the film is brilliantly structured, and its unfocused feel is part of its genius.) We see Mecha, the heiress (played, in a miraculous performance, by the great Argentinean actress Graciela Borges), pile endless abuse on the long-suffering maid, accusing her of stealing towels and sheets that no one could really want and pleading with her for ice to freshen her ever-present cocktail, even as Mecha?s adolescent daughter Momi fixates on this same beleaguered woman, driving her mad with her wheedling for attention. Momi?s older sister Verónica says that their mother is going to fire the maid, and Momi begs her not to, although the audience understands that no one is going to do much of anything except pack away liquor by the fetid, green pool. When Mecha drunkenly falls by this same pool, her son José (played by Borges?s real-life son Juan Cruz Bordeu) is called home from Buenos Aires, where he?s indifferently involved with a much-older woman named Mercedes; we?re given to understand too that he and his sister Verónica are perhaps indecently close for siblings. (Throughout the film Martel shows us how, in this family, sex is just another aberration that blooms out of laziness and boredom.) Mercedes was at one time sleeping with Mecha?s grotesquely vain (and always shit-faced-drunk) husband Gregorio (he spends hours weaving in front of the mirror he uses to dye his hair), and Mecha uses Mercedes?s appearance to move him and his belongings to another room, lacking the energy to bother with actually evicting him. The city relatives are headed by timid Tali (played by another Argentinean great, Mercedes Morán, who couldn?t be better); she?s subtly bullied by her genuinely loving husband and is harried by a houseful of kids. And finally Mecha?s housekeeper has romantic troubles of her own, and these spill over into the life of the family.

    Martel, who also wrote, draws on her own childhood, so that a part of the film is told from a childlike perspective, too. One pack of barefoot kids, mostly boys, takes to the mountains for whole days, unsupervised and carrying guns. (Mecha mentions in passing that she ?worries.?) At Tali?s home the stove is on and ladders lean against walls, inviting disaster. The older of the children tell the youngest a sinister story about a dog being raised as a pet whose owner discovers that his dog is in fact a gigantic rat, and the story haunts the children for the remainder of the film. And when Momi, starved for attention, actually dives into the horrifying swimming pool, even older brother José concedes astonishment. (?That pool is filthy,? the housekeeper admonishes her later. ?Don?t go near it. You?ll get sick.?)

    Nothing much is spoken of directly in La Ciénaga (one notable exception occurs when Mecha comes across her husband passed out face down and says, ?What a pig you turned out to be?), but Martel has created an on-screen world that speaks volumes about the lives being led randomly in its midst. Hers is a unique sensibility (and an honest one; for example, she portrays very economically the racist barriers separating the European-descended Argentineans from the indigenous ones) and her style as a filmmaker fits it; she uses her camera suggestively and expressively, conveying both the intoxication and tedium of idleness with a true storyteller?s unfailing eye. And her editing rhythms ? especially in a wonderfully ominous opening sequence ? align with her vision so skillfully that it requires some effort to remember that this film was her debut.

    La Ciénaga is remarkable in its own right, but as a first effort it?s truly extraordinary and Martel?s is a subtly new sensibility. Watching it, I thought of similarly arresting debuts: David Lynch?s Eraserhead and Polanski?s Knife in the Water. The name Lucrecia Martel is not so familiar to cineastes as those others, but, despite the lukewarm reception to her second feature, my guess is that it will be one day soon.
  • SeanMurray
    December 19, 2008
    SeanMurray
    really good, strange sub-plots
  • 339z
    November 28, 2008
    339z
    wow just seen this movie 4 the 1st time n think that this is a really good movie 2 watch....its got a really good cast of actors/actressess throughout this movie...i think that the director of this Art House & International, Drama, Comedy
    movie had done a really good job of dir...( read more)ecting this movie because you never know what 2 expect throughout this movie...its got a really good cast of actors/actressess throughout this movie its got no plot but its a really good Art House & International, Drama, Comedy
    movie 2 watch because its enjoyable
  • yakinbozek
    September 8, 2008
    yakinbozek
    La Cienaga by Lucrecia Martel

    The best argentine movie in such a long time! Artistic, minimal, subtle. Excelent

    via Atari Burroughs http://www.atari-b.blogspot.com

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Critic Reviews

October 19, 2001
Roger Ebert, Chicago Sun-Times

By its end we are glad to see the last of most of its characters, but we will not quickly forget them. full review

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