Let's take this lyng down

It may be the most horizontal movie I have ever seen. The teeming populace of La Ciénaga (2001), Lucrecia Martel’s beguiling feature debut, spend an inordinate amount of time lying down, usually awake, sometimes several to a bed, sometimes with limbs splayed in various positions. There are amazingly dynamic geometries composed of bodies just trying to get a little rest. The laziness on display in La Ciénaga is charming and funny, and maybe also appalling, emblematic of the liminal space La Ciénaga nimbly inhabits, as though suspended on a high-wire, scathing social commentary on one side, vivid, goofy, impressionistic sounds and images on the other. The film is idiosyncratic, utterly personal, yet riddled with the political, with class critiques suggested only in playful ways. It’s a stunningly confident work. And the great news is that it’s now available from Criterion.

“La Ciénaga.” “The Swamp.” It’s the name Martel gives to the place where she grew up in northwestern Argentina. Part of this film’s allure is also what makes it very difficult to summarize. It is about two families. It is about a summer home, with a pool, and bedrooms, and lots of wine drank with ice, and an adjoining forest where the boys go to play with guns. It is very much about the bourgeoisie, but it’s told from the inside: many of the characters are often drunk (this would make a pretty good double-feature with The Swimmer), and the camerawork is somehow brilliantly choreographed and also stumbling and tipsy too; as rough-and-tumble as the cameras of John Cassavetes, but with a precision Cassavetes’ beloved mania wasn’t designed to take on. The film is autobiographical and the camera is never editorializing. The editing, of course, is another matter. It’s elliptical, teasing. Those boys with the guns: one wants to shoot a dead, muddy cow; another stands in the way; we cut to a shot of the landscape, no figures in sight, and we hear the gunshot, not knowing if someone’s been hit. If Martel made conventional narrative films we’d call her a master manipulator. But there is nothing conventional and little that’s narrative-forward about La Ciénaga.

It begins thusly: following an atonal aria in which a chorus of the world’s noisiest, cheapest-looking lawn chairs are dragged across tile, one of our two matriarchs, totally stinko, collapses, cutting herself badly. Her daughter comes to pull pieces of glass from her chest. A lazy assessment of La Ciénaga might say that nothing happens, but the film’s gambit rests in the opposite camp: everything happens, though it happens in fragments, in shards, with scenes that start halfway-in and end before they’re resolved; with more characters—family, friends and servants, victims of racial slurs—than we can be expected to keep track of. Martel is focused on immersing us in this world and that’s exactly what she’s so devastatingly good at. The film is so funny—the blitzed characters getting so animated about the idea of shipping for school supplies in Bolivia—the dialogue so curious, the images so transfixing, we might forgot that this is also an oblique indictment of a culture of waste and sloth, snobbery and unjust disparity, of tackiness and unchecked Catholic neurosis. All these ingredients will come into play in Martel’s subsequent films, The Holy Girl (2004) and The Headless Woman (2008), each of which feature fewer characters, or at least feature central characters, and something close to what we might call a storyline. Paragons of the New Argentine Cinema, they feel sprung from the same swamp yet each are inventive, provocative variations. Seeing La Ciénaga reminds us of how vast Martel’s powers are—and how long we’ve had to wait for more.

                             

Under the influence of a reckless moment: The Headless Woman

It begins with an accident on a country road. The driver, the sole occupant of the vehicle, stops the car, but keeps her eyes forward. Her name is Verónica, or Vero, for short. She does not examine what it is she’s run over, and this moment of decision or neglect or shock and confusion extends like a prolonged exhalation—or better yet, like a scream trapped in one’s throat. The moment is maddeningly still, chilling, and transfixing. Vero composes herself and drives on.

Things start to get strange. Vero goes to a hospital to be examined. She goes to a hotel instead of going home, even though home doesn’t seem that far away. She sleeps with a man who is not her husband, whether out of habit or in a sudden fit of desire is uncertain. She takes a shower with her clothes on. Of course, we don’t know yet where her home is. We don’t know yet who her husband is. We don’t know yet that she even has a husband. Exposition has been forsaken in lieu of something tantalizingly ambiguous. We’re asked to collect clues on our own, to stay a little more alert than most movies ask us to be. If you treasure the experience of entering a mystery blind you might want to consider just watching The Headless Woman (2008) and reading the rest of this later.

Vero’s behaviour is as compelling as her motives are nearly inscrutable, to the degree that certain sequences become comical, such the one that finds Vero sitting calmly in the waiting room of a dental clinic, as though she’s a patient and not one of the resident dentists. Vero banged her head in the collision—does she suffer from amnesia? There are more than enough noir flourishes in The Headless Woman to suggest such a movie-movie conceit. There’s something sufficiently elliptical in this slowly unraveling tale to suggest that all that follows may be the depiction of some extended fugue state. We’re immersed in subjectivity. We’ve perhaps entered a dream, but if so it isn’t a dream of mist and echoes but one of precise and vivid realist detail. One from which one doesn’t ever entirely wake.

This is the third film from the Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, who had something of an art house hit with The Holy Girl (04), which is warmer than this latest film and actually a sort of comedy. Martel’s uncompromising sense of open-endedness and refusal to orient audiences either narratively or morally is tempered by her humour, her singular eye for fascinatingly peculiar bits of human interaction, and her immaculate, almost classical craftsmanship—a combination that’s allowed her to make her last two films under the auspices of the Almodóvar brothers, who are credited as co-producers. Although it played in very few theatres in Canada and the US, The Headless Woman is now available on DVD from Stand Releasing, which means that we can watch and re-watch it and piece together the shards of Vero’s posttraumatic daze. Once you do it’s surprising how coherent Martel’s narrative actually is—there isn’t a minute of this movie that’s not integral of the whole.

Yet the film’s brilliance, what makes you want to bother to seek out this coherence in the first place, is that no matter how much plot you glean certain shadows linger, expanding beyond the immediate story until it spreads into the sociological. Vero’s world is one where race and class-based inequities are less discreet than ours, and the meaning of her crime in this context can hardly be missed. When Vero gradually begins to recall or accept what’s transpired and attempts to resolve the situation however she can, the film’s creepier implications are revealed. She needn’t worry about her hit and run being discovered because there are others of her same social standing who, like friendly little elves, are cleaning up her mess while she recovers.

As remarkable as Martel’s writing and direction is, The Headless Woman would still be only half a movie were it not for the central performance of María Onetto. With her bottle-blonde hair—which she eventually changes, like a guilty heroine from Hitchcock—her heavy lidded eyes, and her sedate smile that could speak to some inner mischief as easily as serenity, Onetto reminds me most of some tranquilized version of Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence (74). Neither ingratiating nor alienating, Onetto doesn’t judge Vero but instead fully embodies her to the point where, against all odds, we identify with her. As with many a noir protagonist, we know she’s done something at least a little awful, even if we’re unsure of the gravity of the consequences of her actions—yet we can’t take our eyes off of her. And neither can Martel, who frames Onetto in ways that are endlessly curious, paying special attention to her neck and ears. Martel and Onetto insist on our intimacy if we’re to stick with the film, until by the end we too feel a little headless, totally intrigued, entertained, creeped out, and probably wondering what these women will do next.

2000s: the decade in debuts

What follows was co-authored my friend and Vue Weekly colleague Brian Gibson, who's been hard at work since the start of 2009 on surveying the decade's movies in a variety of ways. Thanks to Brian for suggesting this piece... not to mention tracking down all those clips!

The Return

From the evidence of Andrei Zvyagintsev’s first film, The Return (2003), winner of the Golden Lion, there’s a lot to hope for. An astonishing debut with an ominousness as chilly as the lake the two boys and their father cross near the film’s end (tragically, one of the young actors in the film drowned in another lake nearby soon after the film was shot), The Return, shot by Mikhail Krichman, is a little like a small-scale Russian epic if it were made by Terrence Malick. From the beginning, Zvyagintsev manages to combine a curiously restrained visual flair (especially with nature shots) with a uniquely paced rhythm of seething psychological suspense, perhaps filtered from his own experience—his father disappeared when he was six. His next film, The Banishment (07), adapted from a novel by William Saroyan, received more mixed reviews, but has yet to appear here, even on disc, while a segment for New York, I Love You that he directed was cut but will appear on the DVD. Will the incredibly bright light of his debut become more dimly diffused in the coming years? (BG)

Syndromes and a Century

I still haven’t seen most of the work of prolific Thai filmmaker Apichatpong Weerasethakul, and very likely neither have you. But just speak these titles aloud: Mysterious Object at Noon (00), Blissfully Yours (02), Worldly Desires (04), Tropical Malady (04). The spell begins even before the lights go down—we are in the hands of one of those rare artists who recognize the movies as a medium perfectly fit for such things as sensuality, eros, fecundity, mystery, and, indeed, bliss. Syndromes and a Century (06), which Brian reviewed, rooted in the story of the director’s parents and their early careers as physicians in a semi-rural Thai hospital, seemed ripe for a breakthrough, but it seems we still need to wait for the right conditions to allow Apichatpong’s vision to reach a wider audience—Syndromes didn’t even play domestically in Thailand due to Apichatpong’s refusal to cut scenes for the national censors. (JB)

The Taste of Others

After working with co-writer and husband Jean-Pierre Bacri on scripts for others, Agnès Jaoui set them off on their own in 2000 with her directorial debut, The Taste of Others (clips and an interview with Jaoui can be found at 25:05 of this Charlie Rose episode). Apart from the awkwardly translated title, this is an utterly smooth, slow-building comedy of, well, not manners so much as discrimination—discriminating tastes and class assumptions. Jaoui and Bacri’s great skill lies in turning us away from the most obviously flawed and hypocritical characters to make us see how everyone in the film is unconsciously compromising themselves (including the characters she plays). Jaoui happens to reveal Woody Allen as a pale shadow of his former self in her light, yet unblinkingly honest, examinations of upper-middle-class self-absorption, as further proven by her second film, Look At Me. Her third, Let’s Talk About The Rain, has yet to be released over here, though it’s already screened in Europe. (BG)

Half-Nelson

On this side of the Atlantic, another partnership had a stunning debut in the 2000s. Anna Boden and Ryan Fleck wrote 2006’s Half Nelson, with Fleck directing the tale of an inner-city school teacher, Dan Dunne. Ryan Gosling anchored the film as Dunne, but Shareeka Epps was just as good as Drey. Next came the even more understated Sugar (08), carefully studying a Dominican ballplayer trying to make it to the big leagues. Boden and Fleck are ingenious at offering a kind of unassuming-ness in their films, simply slipping into small, everyday situations and then tweaking them ever so slightly for a taut dramatic narrative. Half Nelson was more carefully scripted, especially its tender playing with pairs throughout the film, and more viscerally grounded in one place. But between the two of them, and their two films, Fleck and Boden show all the makings of at least two more superb films in the next decade. (BG)

The Holy Girl

At the time of writing, I’ve seen one utterly mesmerizing, unforgettable movie and one pretentious, self-absorbed piece of twaddle from Lisandro Alonso—Los Muertos (04) and Fantasma (06), respectively—so I’m reluctant to comment on whether Argentina has two new filmmakers deserving of the title of the decade’s best new directors**, but I don’t hesitate for a moment to say she has at least one in Lucrecia Martel. Martel’s breakthrough was The Holy Girl (04), and this may still be her undisputed masterpiece—so far. That movie, which I wrote about upon its Canadian release, placed a mother and daughter in a hotel where a medical convention is being held and one of the guests is making advances on both. The daughter blurs normally separate notions of what constitutes a vocation, and her religious and sexual education fuse into a deliciously strange and often quirkily humorous drama. La Ciénaga (01) and The Headless Woman (08) are more overtly linked to one another in that both are immersed in the daily lives of upper-middle-class Argentine families and the gulf that exists between their lifestyles and perceptions and those of the indigenous people who often work as their appallingly underappreciated servants. These are stories characterized by humour and haunting dreamlike episodes, interrupted by death and prompting questions of responsibility. (JB)

Silent Light

Amores Perros (00) launched the Mexican decade with an adrenaline shot of urban desperation, a tripartite weave of neo-pulp fictions that imposed poetic unity on the disparate socioeconomic subsections of the country’s teeming capital. Yet a decade and two features later, Alejandro González Iñárritu’s debut now looks far less significant either historically or artistically than Carlos Reygadas’ Japón (02), in which a middle-aged man leaves Mexico City behind in search of some remote place to end his life, a journey that finds him communing with the elderly and magnetic lady of the mountains, Magdalena Flores. It says a lot about Reygadas’ peculiar vision that, even while wearing his influences on his sleeve—the overall approach to narrative and mise en scène in Japón leans heavily on both Tarkovsky and Kiarostami, while Reygadas’ use of actors is clearly indebted to Bresson—his films remain absolutely singular, mysterious, and beguilingly incomplete, each leaving the viewer with numerous puzzling questions. Teetering on the edge of the thriller genre with its story of high-class prostitutes and child kidnapping, the very strangely erotic, image-laden and politically charged Battle in Heaven (05) was an even more provocative and adventurous follow-up, while Silent Light (07), which sensitively chronicled a love triangle set amidst Chihuahua’s Mennonite community, found Reygadas already producing work of the sort of maturity we associate with artists entering the autumnal phase of their careers. (JB)

George Washington

There’s still a case to be made for David Gordon Green as the American decade’s most funky, distinctive, and resolutely innocent, indigenous new voice. If you have a hard time figuring out how to place the sweetly sublime rural reveries of George Washington (00) with the stoner bromance hi-jinx of Pineapple Express (08), you probably haven’t spent enough time with either movie. Green’s voice, however employed, is pretty unmistakable. Green’s career—the previously mentioned titles were bridged by youthful romance in All the Real Girls (02), “Deliverance for kids” in Undertow (03), and wintry small town despair in Snow Angels (08)—consistently encircles commercial viability while never quite embracing unabashed populism. With George Washington—still his most personal and wondrous film—critics had pegged Green as the wide-eyed inheritor of ’70s transcendentalist Terrence Malick’s always almost-aborted career, but the real question now seems to be whether Green is going to settle instead for being the new Michael Ritchie. There was always something of The Bad News Bears (76) imbuing Green’s strongly regionalist sensibility—which isn’t necessarily bad news at all. (JB)

Shotgun Stories

Arkansas native Jeff Nichols showed his own remarkable maturity, developed through six short films, with his feature debut. Just 26 when he wrote and directed Shotgun Stories, in 2004, it was produced by none other than David Gordon Green and released in 2007. The film reinvents the cliché of Southern revenge, sliding into the pickup’s passenger seat alongside a small town’s working class before retribution skids out. The South’s a place of almost self-suffocating, low-level tension here, its folk struggling to get on in spots and corners stripped of much opportunity. Nichols looks to continue his run of talent with Goat, from a script by Green. (BG)

Down in the Valley

Californian David Jacobson hit the Midwest in 2002 with his second film, Dahmer, effectively his debut after the little-seen Criminal (94). A remarkably unsensational look at the notorious serial killer, the film entered the creepy ordinariness of the man’s job and city (Milwaukee) and featured Jeremy Renner as Dahmer, slipping away from all sense of himself with every murder. It’s a film that soars beyond its seamy subgenre. Edward Norton then starred for Jacobson in Down in the Valley, a fascinating Western take on Taxi Driver that reworks the American-rebel film, even in this scene, where ingénue meets cowboy. This new take on old tropes mirrors the mix of freshness and revisionism that infuse Jacobson’s work, tinged as they are with loss and hope, nostalgia and anger, with looking back but trying to always get ahead. (BG)

** Okay, the night after I wrote this I saw Liverpool (08), Alonso's most recent film. It's absolutely beautiful, and that makes two points for Argentina!