Tropical vegetation on a bluish thunderous sky. Red peppers dry impassively on a tin roof. What seems to be a gunshot wakes up the birds, but is it? A couple of glasses are topped up with wine, red too, of a particularly garish tint. A woman’s hand clumsily drops some ice in one and picks it up, making the cubes clink insistingly, almost uncomfortably. Garden chairs are wearily dragged on the paving around a disused swimming pool. The putrid water. An awkwardly choreographed dance of aged tan bodies and abusive screechy sounds. Much hustle to go nowhere, not far. And then, definitely, another distant gunshot.
The opening sequence of La ciénaga, however annoyingly intercut with black title cards sporting a questionable graphic effect, is beyond description. A stroke of bravura, both narrative and directorial, not only acting as a proper ouverture to the story that is about to unfold, but also quietly hinting at the current sociopolitical state of the country. Argentina at last millennium sunset, that is.
Lucrecia Martel’s striking feature debut is wet and green and sweaty. It smells of swamp, it has its colours, and the carnal weight of the murky depth of a pond. It is a film soaked in muddled conflicts that moves at the pace of the adults’ compliant ineptitude, while the young are desperately urged to grow, if into a cynical disillusion. Formally mirroring the intro, in the final scene Momi noisily drags a chair to sit next to her sister Veronica, who’s placidly lying by the pool in the unbearable heat. ‘Adónde fuiste?’ asks the latter, seemingly resurrecting from a nap. ‘Fui donde se apareció la Virgen.’ Long pause. ‘No vi nada.’

He is standing on the shore contemplating an almost motionless sea, acknowledging his own limits as a bureaucrat, a man, a father, a whoremonger—and the absurdity of the pompous culture he represents for necessity. He is at a dead-end, retreating being his only option, although a seemingly impossible one.
Don Diego de Zama, the strenuous corregidor, the resolute and righteous judge. He who brought peace among the Indians and made justice without ever drawing the sword. But also Zama the desperate man, lost and distant, consumed by the atrocious loneliness of a God born old who cannot die.
Lucrecia Martel delves once more into the inmost feelings of an alienated creature, his broken dialogue with a world that was once his and is no more—and does so with exquisite taste, delivering one of the best of our time.