TOO CLOSE
FOR COMFORT
by
Chris Dashiell
In the morass known as the summer movie season, encountering
a film with vision is like being awakened suddenly from a trance. For
a while I forget that real imagination, real poetry - not a commerce-laden
facsimile - is possible on the screen. Then, against all odds, a work
of art appears at a theater. And I remember again why I bother writing
about movies.
La
Ciénaga, the debut feature of writer/director Lucrecia
Martel, takes place in a dilapidated summer home in northwest rural
Argentina during the sticky days of Carnival. We are immediately placed
in the midst of an unhappy, indolent extended family, the director requiring
us (or as I would prefer to say, allowing us) to discern the characters
and relationships gradually for ourselves. Mecha (Graciela Borges),
the family's alcoholic matriarch, stumbles and cuts herself severely
at a boozy pool party. After she's released from the hospital her cousin
Tali (Mercedes Morán) comes to help, with her four children in
tow, which - combined with Mecha's three kids and grown-up son José
- makes for a house full of chaos.
Mecha's
husband (Martín Adejmián) is a vain and ineffectual drunk
who once had an affair with the same woman who is now bedding his son
José. Fifteen-year-old daughter Momi (Sofia Bertolotto), sullen
and lonely, has developed a passionate attachment to the family's young
Indian servant Isabel (Andrea López). While Mecha lies in bed
drinking and complaining about the servants, the male children roam
the nearby forest shooting off guns. At one point the kids tell one
another an urban legend about a woman who picked up a stray dog that
ended up eating her cats - a vet then tells her that it's not a dog
at all, but a huge African rat. This story disturbs little Luciano,
Tali's youngest son, and his queries about the African rat become one
of the movie's thematic strands.
This summary doesn't begin to cover all of La Ciénaga's
characters and interactions. It also may give the mistaken impression
that the film is one of those multi-narrative family dramas with carefully
drawn motivations and resolutions for each person. What Martel does
instead is portray the atmosphere of this family's life, the ordinary
moments of existence, sometimes seen as if by a fly on the wall, 
other
times in the middle of things, with the camera seeming to share the
disjointed, enveloping sensations of people thrown together in a stifling
environment of dysfunction. Never before have I seen the depiction of
children and teens in groups done so well - running loose, running rings
around the adults, with talking and yelling and acting out of emotions
interwoven with silences where the thoughts occur that they don't know
how to express. This is naturalism at its best. No authorial voice interferes
to color the scene for us - the irony and pathos and bitterness and
desire arise from the action itself, perfectly wedded with the director's
fluid style.
La
Ciénaga (which translates as "The Swamp") has deeper layers
of social and political awareness. The malaise of Mecha's family, with
its decrepit pretense of affluence, evokes the position of the Argentine
middle class in the context of the nation's continued suffering and
collapse. The relationship between the family and the Indian servants
conveys the country's complex legacy of racial oppression. And a recurring
element - the reporting on TV of a sighting of the Virgin Mary standing
near a water tower on somebody's roof - represents both the persistence
of superstition and spiritual aspiration as symptoms of modern life
in Argentina. None of this is overt or didactic - it is presented seamlessly
as part of the film's realistic fabric.
All
the younger actors are nonprofessionals - a startling fact when you
consider the confidence of the performances. It would seem that Martel
found a way to make everyone feel at home in front of the camera. The
photography and sound are brilliant - the ominous rumblings of thunder
in the mist-filled mountains that surround the summer house are like
portents of death and decay, and the intense visual texture makes it
feel as if you've been sweltering in the summer heat yourself. La
Ciénaga is a remarkable work of vision - a realistic film
that doesn't turn away or distance itself from the sadness of what it
shows, and has the courage of a human point of view as well, not above
us, but right in the midst of our struggles, limitations, and everyday
hopes.
In
the vague terms of measurement I often find myself resorting to in reviewing
films, I notice that the distance between the great and the merely good
is perhaps a thousand times the distance between the good, the mediocre,
and the bad. In other words, there is a difference in kind rather than
degree when it comes to the truly great film - a difference that can't
be faked by any amount of money, technique, or even sincerity.
A useful comparison is supplied in this case by Ray Lawrence's
Lantana, a relationship drama that has been getting a
lot of praise lately, in lieu of box office. It's hard not be soured
on middlebrow films after seeing something as vital as La Ciénaga,
but as they taught me in writing class, "First look for the good." So
I will.
Sydney,
Australia detective Leon Zat (Anthony LaPaglia) has become more and
more emotionally frozen, a condition he reacts to by cheating on his
wife Sonja (Kerry Armstrong) with a divorcée (Rachael Blake)
that he met at a dance class. Sonja worries out loud to her psychiatrist
Valerie (Barbara Hershey) about her foundering marriage. Meanwhile,
Valerie's own marriage is troubled after the recent murder of her young
daughter - she and her husband (Geoffrey Rush) can't seem to break through
their grief, and the confessions of a gay patient make her suspicious
of her husband's sexuality.
The
disappearance and possible murder of one of the characters heats up
the drama, and the cross-cutting of the plot strands is aided by several
(overly) coincidental encounters. LaPaglia underplays the depressed
detective, which gives the part some heft. Armstrong and Blake shade
their differing vulnerabilities in expert fashion. The mystery element
has the virtue of revealing the characters in unexpected lights, and
its solution has some poignancy. Lantana, then, has some of the
strengths of the traditional "well-made play." What it doesn't have
is much spirit, or a convincing point of view.
Besides
the simple plot elements that strain credulity (Would a detective really
take on a case involving his lover? Would a therapist react so naively
to her own suspicious thoughts about a patient?), Lantana's ideas
seem forced on the material rather than springing from it. LaPaglia's
character is disconnected from his feelings because the script says
he is. The Hershey and Rush characters have suffered the murder of a
child because this dovetails with later developments in the plot. One
can see the hand of the writer constructing everything for us - it's
based on a play by Andrew Bovell - but the very carefulness of the set-up,
the planned significance of its insights, drains the film of life.
Lantana
is about trust, and how couples need to make a leap of faith in order
to stay in love with each other. To some degree it's also about the
denial of vulnerability in men. All this is admirable, and some of it
even comes across through the skill of performance. But I never really
believed in these people, never quite got beyond the artifice of the
script or Lawrence's overly controlled style. This sense of authenticity
is a difficult thing to describe - you notice it most when it's not
there. There's a magic that happens between directors and actors, or
between the script and the director's style, that produces this elusive
feeling of belief in the viewer. I never fell into the world of Lantana,
which means that it doesn't live in my memory the way a great film like
La Ciénaga does.
In
any case, there's a perfectly good reason why Lantana is being
praised. It's not a crass Hollywood spectacle designed for passive idiots.
It actually contains thoughts, and a certain degree of sensitivity.
This is what we've come to, you see. Garbage is the standard by which
motion pictures are now measured. Anything that raises its sight even
a bit above the level of mindless crap is a reason for gratitude. The
critic, therefore, must tread lightly.
©2002 Chris Dashiell
CineScene
