La Cienaga (The Swamp)

10 April 2012

South America's new filmmaking generation is a questioning one.

What it questions is the torpor of a subcontinent whose social energies are being continuously sucked out of it like the swamp waters that immobilise the film's poor cow, the commonest beast of food, work and fertility, which can barely keep its nostrils above the surface.

The herbivore's plight stands for the human malaise enveloping the households of two cousins, one generous and level-headed ( Mercedes Mor·n), the other self-centred and on edge (Graciela Borges). As in Bertolucci's Stealing Beauty, the characters belong to the leisured class, though one whose natural tendency to indolence is now bordering on paralytic inertia. The swimming pool is a useless hole, the filtration kaput. There are frequent power cuts. The kids don't see further than their own frustrated agendas. As for answering the phones, have the Indian servants gone deaf ?

Luis Bu"uel, who worked in Mexico, where penury and cruelty were the fuses that exploded his savage early films, would recognise these symptoms: they bled into his later surreal comedies of bourgeois anomie. Director Lucretia Martel, in her debut film, uses them to create an atmosphere of oppressive redundancy in which thunder rumbles above the clink of glasses at cocktail hour and clouds frown on the sun worshippers.

Dubbed "New Argentine Cinema", the stirrings of social criticism which this film represents prefer to generate unease rather than, as yet, bite deeply. They may well be a throwback to the cinema of the 1950s, when the late Leopoldo Torre Nilsson and his novelist-playwright wife, Beatriz Guido, indicted the hypocrisy and corruption of the Argentinian establishment. Things have a way of resurfacing even in a swamp, and in a country where the past seems more palpable than the present and the future doesn't begin at all.

La Cienaga (The Swamp)
Cert: 12A

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