Programme Notes

Lucrecia Martel's first film has won first prizes from Berlin to Sundance. She wields a controlled, acrid talent and she may be part of the future of an Argentine cinema which, with funding, could startle the world. Meanwhile, here is Iguana on a Hot Tin Roof.

It's steamy summer in the city in the north-west of the country they call the Swamp - a Deep South in the far, forgotten north. Mecha and her shrivelled, stumbling husband have retreated to their country estate to consume crates of Cabernet Sauvignon with their friends and lie comatose while her teenage kids go shooting in the sub-tropical forest. Her poorer cousin, Tali, comes up from the city with her children to visit. Maybe they'll go on a shopping trip to Bolivia; maybe they won't. The Indian servants are there to be shouted at or apologised to. Mecha cuts herself and takes a bottle to bed. Tali tries to make sense of her life. The teens grow up because the adults have bombed out. A random tragedy draws a line under their lives.

It is, as it sounds, not much fun. Nor is it neatly structured. The beginning and the end are almost random. But Martel triumphantly submerges herself - and us - in the day-to-day existence of a provincial middle class which is almost (like the girls in their cutaway shorts) modern but also as cracked and cloudy as the decrepit swimming pool on the estate.

La Cienaga isn't unrelieved gloom because it holds up a mirror to life, absurdities and all. It's superbly acted by Graciela Borges as Mecha, Mercedes Moran as Tali and the lissome Leonara Balcarce as the fiery daughter, and wonderfully photographed by Hugo Colace. You may not want to travel to La Cienaga country when you've seen it - but that's because you know, deep down, that you've been there already.

Peter Preston
Sunday October 7, 2001
The Observer