AllMovie

A sober portrait of middle-class torpor and decadence, Lucrecia Martel's debut feature covers well-trod ground, but she gives the material her own imprimatur. Set in present-day Argentina, La Cienaga offers a snapshot of a culture stuck in a sweltering rut. The movie tells the story of two families' summer holiday, spent in a decaying estate in the mountains. Physical details accumulate: the insistent clinking of ice cubes in glasses, the scrape of metal chairs on a concrete patio, people splayed in beds trying to sleep through the humidity. Martel's knack for establishing tactile hyper-reality is almost too much -- this sticky, sweaty film can be off-puttingly palpable. Heightening the uneasy mood is the movie's busy sound design, which itself is amplified by the absence of a musical score. For U.S. audiences unfamiliar with contemporary Argentine culture, there is much in the film that is revelatory, such as a glimpse of that society's dysfunctional class dynamics and tortured race relations. Familiar though its targets and lessons may be, the movie is of a piece and has its own distinctive feel. Its occasional heavy-handedness and a needlessly reproachful ending aside, La Cienaga unfolds with an assurance that belies Martel's inexperience, and signals the emergence of a new talent in world cinema.