At the intersection between class and sanity resides La Ciénaga, the ambitious directorial debut of Lucrecia Martel, one of the most important South American directors of the last few decades. She weaves together a story of a bourgeois family that spend their leisure time luxuriating at their secluded summer home somewhere in pastoral Argentina, which is also the sight where their matriarch falls victim to an accident that confines her to stay in bed, which ultimately causes her to sink not only into addiction, but also to begin to abuse those around her, whether they’re her loyal employees, or her loving family. A fascinating tapestry of a contemporary family that have dispersed across the country and are living their own lives, while still being drawn together by an almost celestial force that binds them to this particular estate that is isolated from the rest of the world, and falling apart due to a lack of maintenance. Martel had some clear intentions when setting the foundation for La Ciénaga, which loosely translates to “The Swamp”, a more than an adequate name for this home, since not only has it fallen into a state of disrepair, many of the people who reside within it begin to take on animalistic qualities, whether it be the ferocious predator, waiting to pounce on an unsuspecting victim, or those that are forced to reside in the shadows, or else become folly of those that yield power and influence, which is proven to be far more than just an abstract concept, even within a familial setting, which sets the tone for the bewildering story we’re about to experience, and the interweaving lives that sit at its centre.

La Ciénaga is certainly not an easy film, which should be clear to anyone who is aware of Martel’s approach to filmmaking. It takes a while for us to fully comprehend exactly what it is we’re looking at, since the director seems to be quite averse to offering any exposition, or even just establishing a direction from the start that allows us to gently submerge ourselves in this world. Instead, we’re thrown into the middle of this estate, where the film begins in media res, just before the pivotal accident befalls Mecha, which is relatively minor considering the extent of her injuries, but becomes the first centrepiece moment of a film built almost entirely on small details. It takes us on an intimate journey into the heart of this family, presenting us with a very different kind of upstairs-downstairs scenario, where the focus is still on a wealthy family and their team of servants employed to tend to their every need, but done in a way that is slightly perverse and manipulative, each interaction setting off an entirely new series of complications in what is already a twisted situation for many of these people. Making sense of a Martel film can sometimes be a foolish expectation, since not only is she a director that often refuses to make use of the kind of logical storytelling device many would expect from a filmmaker, she seems to relish in deconstructing the form to the point where we’re forced to endure some excruciating scenes, only to emerge on the other side both repulsed and utterly riveted, which is something that should be expected from a filmmaker as singular in her vision as Martel.

It’s important to remember that La Ciénaga was Martel’s first feature film, and as a result, it has the expected teething problems that come packaged with a debut effort. The film is certainly quite rough around the edges, and its jagged method of telling this story can be quite concerning if we don’t quite know what to expect from it. By the end, we may not have even figured out the true extent to the message the director conveyed, but we are aware of the fact that we’ve been observing the varied machinations of a family that has gradually begun to fall apart by the seams, whether it be through tensions that have been brewing long before we entered the story, or newer events that gradually tear apart the fabric of what we understand a regular family to be. If anything, La Ciénaga works as Martel’s version of a dysfunctional family saga – absolutely every character in this film is somehow unlikeable (or at least constructed in such a way that they come across as such), with the exception of the children, who serve as audience surrogates, with the director often placing us in their position of seeing the world through the innocent, impressionable eyes of the people who tend to be the most vulnerable, while often seeing what adults often find their vision obscures. It’s a layered exploration of a contemporary family that draws from both the director’s own upbringing, with many of the South American traditions embedded in the story being derived from her own childhood, and a more broad sense of familial tension, with the discussions at the root of the film coming from a place that many of us can recognize.

It’s a peculiar experience to navigate this world, and Martel (as talented a filmmaker as she may be), isn’t much help in regards to steering us in the right direction. The viewer is almost entirely on their own, forced to venture through this sun-soaked family saga without any idea of where it is going to lead – and even by the end of it, we’re not entirely sure of what exactly has transpired, only knowing that the allegiances of many of these characters have shifted, but in a way that still situates them at the same point. Nothing really changes in La Ciénaga, at least not in the way a more traditional film would suggest – these characters remain static in their worldview, while still perpetually trying to move forward, which is a strange but compelling way of developing this ensemble of individuals. It’s a very unconventional character study, since the focus is less on exploring their daily lives, and more on the intricate recesses of their psychological state. La Ciénaga is certainly a film driven more by atmosphere than plot – it’s increasingly rare to find a scene that progresses the story in a significant way, with most of the narrative moving at an intentionally glacial pace. Structured as a series of episodes in the lives of this wide group of characters, some of them taking place entirely in isolation, others when the lives of these individuals begin to overlap, the film penetrates the middle-class of Argentina, provoking some very serious ideas without becoming heavy-handed in its commentary. Martel avoids turning La Ciénaga into an exercise in miserabilism by carefully curating the story and ensuring that every detail is intentional and plays a role in the broader story, rather than simply existing in this often disorienting tapestry of fragmented lives.

Not quite a social realist text (since even at her most simple, Martel employs some degree of unsettling magical realism to tell her stories, situating them in uncanny versions of our world, where paranoia and tension are the driving forces behind most decisions), La Ciénaga is a poignant and unsettling portrait of a particular moment in Argentina’s culture, one that isn’t defined by specific events (since everything that happens in this film seems to be relatively divorced from the outside world, lending to the unsettling nature of the film and its isolation from reality), but rather a sense of displacement. Very little in this film makes sense – the motivations to move from one scene to another are often very vague, and the decisions of many of these characters come across as confusing if we just look at them from the surface. However, La Ciénaga remains a fascinating artefact, since it says more about the society it was made in than even the most hard-hitting piece of non-narrative filmmaking. As far as Martel is concerned, there is very little need for her to convince us to anything that’s contained within this film, since the social and cultural milieu that is gradually uncovered throughout sufficiently explores the intricate details – all the director needs to do is hold a camera up to these scenarios and hopefully capture some small amount of the complex discussions that come about as a result of such interactions. Cold, arid and uncomfortable, and driven by a mosaic of individual scenes that ultimately converge into an unsettling portrait of a group of individuals bound by various associations with one another, La Ciénaga is a strange but compelling film, and an audacious debut for a filmmaker that we now know would not abandon this line of reasoning, but rather develop it in even more exciting, captivating ways with her future productions, proving what a gifted artist she is, and how even the most straightforward narratives can be woven into unforgettable experiences with her at the helm.