La Ciénaga

The title of La Ciénaga translates to “The Swamp" or “The Quagmire,” and that's a fitting description for the film's hot, humid setting in northwestern Argentina, where middle-aged Mecha (Graciela Borgés) drinks her miseries away while her bored teenagers and do-nothing husband lounge about on the country estate that's slowly rotting in the wake of the family's once-wealthy splendor (sullen servants still hover semi-attentively). When Mecha's cousin visits from the nearby city of La Ciénaga, bringing along her noisy kids, the visit sets in motion a ticking time-bomb of interfamilial tensions. In her remarkable feature-film directorial debut, writer-director Lucrecia Martel examines this hotbed of strained domesticity with a keen eye for visual and emotional detail (producing both laughs and uncomfortable anxiety), creating a portrait that is mesmerizing, occasionally squirm-inducing, and full of human truth. As critic and film scholar B. Ruby Rich notes in her accompanying mini-essay, director Pedro Almódovar was so impressed with this film that he signed on as executive producer of Martel's second film. Recommended. [Note: DVD extras include the director's earlier short film Rey Muerto, which won several awards on the film-festival circuit. Bottom line: a nice bonus for a fine foreign film.] (J. Shannon)[Blu-ray/DVD Review—Jan. 27, 2015—Criterion, 101 min., in Spanish w/English subtitles, R, DVD: $29.95, Blu-ray: $39.95—Making its latest appearance on DVD and debut on Blu-ray, 2001's La Ciénaga sports an excellent transfer and a DTS-HD stereo soundtrack on the Blu-ray release. Extras include interviews with director Lucrecia Martel (19 min.) and filmmaker Andres Di Tella on Martel (24 min.), and an essay by film scholar David Oubiña, and a trailer. Bottom line: a winning slice-of-Argentine-life film makes a welcome debut on Blu-ray.]