What is *La Cienega* (The Swamp, 2001)?

In La Cienega (The Swamp, 2001), first-time filmmaker Lucrecia Martel tells the story of two families: the once-rich pepper farm owners led by Mecha (Graciela Borges), a middle-aged and alcoholic mother of four, and the middle-class city dwellers led by her cousin Tali (Mercedes Morán), also a mother with four children. The film intertwines each family’s narrative, examining the roots and consequences of the choices each protagonist makes.  Ultimately, within the family conflicts explored in the film, the bifurcation between rural and urban and the nature and culture associated with them become blurred, revealing the power of “nature” in both worlds.

The title of the film, The Swamp, establishes its connection with nature, not only as a setting but also as a catalyst for characters’ actions. The title is the name of the town near the Bolivian border where Tali and her family lives, but it also describes the mud in the mountains in which animals become trapped and die as well as a life that has become paralyzing for people who are now resigned to eke out an existence in the foul and putrid atmosphere of a literal and figurative swamp.

In the film’s opening sequence, for example, images of drunken adults sitting motionless around a stagnant filthy swimming pool are juxtaposed with shots of an ox stuck in the deep mud of a literal swamp and unable to move. Pool and swamp become one here, a trope that is reinforced when Mecha falls while attempting to collect wine glasses, and no one comes to her assistance except Momi (Sofia Bertolotto), Mecha’s daughter, and Isabella (Andrea López), her maid.  The adults look on without emotion, just as Mecha’s son Joaquín (Diego Baenas) and his friends watch the ox. The boys in the mountains hold guns, while the adults at the pool hold wine glasses. The sultry heat of "the swamp" connects with the sensual siesta and shower scenes interspersed throughout the film, as well. 

The name of Mecha’s hacienda, La Mandragora, also connects the film and its intertwining families with the natural world. Mandragora is a red pepper farm and decaying mansion owned by the protagonist and her husband, Gregorio (Martín Adjemián), but it is also the name of a plant, the mandrake, a member of the nightshades family with hallucinogenic and sedative qualities, an explicit connection with the sedated figures of decadence around the pool. In fact, when Mecha goes to the Gringo doctor in town after her fall, they must pump her stomach in order to give her needed tranquilizers. This connection between humans and nature embodied in the mandrake is taken further by the shape of the plant, as well. The roots sometimes contain bifurcations causing them to resemble human figures.

The trip to the clinic not only connects the nature of the mandrake with the culture of a Gringo doctor’s sedatives. It also explicitly connects Mecha with Tali, highlighting their parallel family lives that also mirror the threatening natural world around them. Tali has also brought her son, Luciano (Sebastian Montagna), into the clinic for stitches, illustrating his connection with Mecha and foreshadowing his fall at the end of the film. According to Martel, “Family is a living and self-sufficient organism where the bodies, apart from their ties to blood, are linked in time, weariness, lunch time, bathrooms, in situations where the body is less exposed to social convention.” This reading of “family” ties it with both the natural world and a human nature that may mean consequences become fated rather than a product of free will.

Connections with the natural world are also embodied in the soundtrack of The Swamp. The almost constant sound of thunder announcing a storm parallels Mecha’s fall onto wine glasses and the light bulb explosion in Tali’s house, for example. In both Mecha’s and Tali’s households, a storm is threatened by the hidden conflicts between spouses, as well. Mecha’s husband, Gregorio, tries to recapture his lost youth both by dying his hair and, it is suggested, pursuing extramarital affairs. Tali, for example, reveals that Gregorio formerly had a sexual relationship with Mercedes (Silvia Baylé ), Mecha’s oldest son Jose’s (Juan Cruz Bordeu) current roommate and lover. Both Mecha and Gregorio drink excessively throughout the day, seemingly to cope with lost power and wealth. In Mecha’s household, “La Mandragora,” Mecha controls her husband, with whom she has lost respect, and daughter Momi (Sofia Bertolotto) and servant Isabel (Andrea López) serve as rational strongholds, maintaining order in an otherwise chaotic drunken adult world.

Tali’s husband, Rafael (Daniel Valenzuela), on the other hand, counters any attempts by Tali to extend her power outside the home. Tali’s plan to travel to Bolivia to buy more inexpensive school supplies is quietly usurped by her husband when he secretly buys them himself. In a scene near the end of the film, Rafael ignores Tali’s questions about papers to cross the Argentine border, and Tali’s internal turmoil is illustrated only by the crash of an exploding light bulb. Rafael’s dominance is established as the norm, then, by Tali’s reactions to his quiet authority. All of these conflicts seem fated in the context of the film, especially since the “fall” that opens the film is repeated several times by different figures, highlighting the inevitable of a loss of innocence or grace.

As reviewer B. Ruby Rich declares, "In La Cienaga, Lucrecia Martel melds personality and geography, performance and mise-en-scene` into a singular whole, fused by a unity that uses camerawork and editing rhythms to incorporate the audience into the world of the film with visceral precision and physical acuity. The routines of daily life are condensed into stencils of behavior and the essence of human nature distilled into a toxic elixir: a life-and-death struggle that emerges, as nature and nurture slug it out, storm clouds mass, and disaster endlessly threatens. Viewers cannot watch the film without feeling the heat or checking the sky for rain"

The film’s last line emphasizes the inevitability of this threatened disaster: “I didn’t see anything,” Momi tells her sister, words that refer not only the image of the Holy Virgin but of life and death itself.