La Ciénaga (2001)

You know that expression about incest being a game for all the family? Well they don’t quite get to that stage here, but they do come pretty close! “Gregorio” (Martín Adjelmián) and wife “Mecha” (Graciela Borges) are hosting their and their friend's eclectic family at their ramshackle Argentinian country house. With a storm brewing in the near-by highlands, they sit by a pool that could easily be the home of scores of piranha fish, sipping red wine whilst their young son and and his pals play in the woods with a real shotgun and it’s very own ciénaga (swamp). It is hard to tell who might actually be sober, or responsible for the goings on until “Mecha” has an accident and needs to be taken to hospital - via an hydrangea bush. What now ensues is quite a messy and oddly ineffective observation of two families at their most dysfunctionally (ab)normal. There are few boundaries for anyone, hormones are left unfettered, tempers flare and the plot goes precisely nowhere. That’s perhaps my problem with all of this. None of these people are remotely likeable. It is like watching an ensemble of the most selfish and spoilt people auteur Lucrecia Martel could conjure from her imagination and then see them engage in bouts of self-indulgent introspection without any of it having any purpose - for them or us. What we do get, though, is a sense of community from the two families that mingle together - both as bad as the other, but neither actually evil or even slightly aware of the excesses of their behaviour. On that front, the acting plaudits must also be shared with Mercedes Morán (Tali) as the female characters dominate this drama leaving scant dialogue for any of the men and only a soupçon of token eye-candy from Juan Cruz Bordeu’s “Josë” - a man whose relationship with his mother stops only just shy of breast feeding! The production design is really quite effective here with the grubbiness of their settings and their dilapidated motor cars selling us a story of a family whose wealth has dwindled from what it might have once been; of a sense of faux decadence and of a framework for an existence that cannot last for much longer. There is a great deal of dialogue and though there is a little comedy contained therein, for the most part it’s fairly relentless as it vacillates from the melodramatic to the plain dramatic. Perhaps I just wasn’t in the mood, but I think every film needs at least one role that the viewer can associate with, and this had none at all for me, sorry.