La Ciénaga (2001)
Average Rating: 6.9/10
Reviews Counted: 36
Fresh: 31 | Rotten: 5
No consensus yet.
Average Rating: 6.7/10
Critic Reviews: 14
Fresh: 12 | Rotten: 2
No consensus yet.
liked it
Average Rating: 3.8/5
User Ratings: 1,302
My Rating
Movie Info
Two families try to make the best of a bad situation as they suffer through a crippling heat wave in this neo-realistic drama, featuring a primarily non-professional cast. Tali (Mercedes Moran) is minding four small children with little help from her husband, who is preoccupied with the opening of hunting season, as a record hot spell grips Argentina. Things aren't much better for her cousin Mecha (Graciela Borges), who is looking after four teenagers and a husband (Martin Adjemian) who can
Oct 3, 2001 Limited
Feb 1, 2005
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La Ciénaga Trailer & Photos
All Critics (44) | Top Critics (17) | Fresh (31) | Rotten (6) | DVD (5)
Experiencing this film ultimately becomes as stimulating as watching metal rust.
Top CriticThere's a real energy in the way that La Cienaga takes nothing for granted -- except your attention and your intelligence.
A strikingly well-directed, relentlessly dreary debut feature from Argentine director Lucrecia Martel.
Look closely and you'll find something not often present in your average art-house flick -- a hint, intense and unsettling, of art itself.
Martel glues together a disjointed picture of a society where tension lies only skin deep.
The triumph of La Cienaga lies in Martel's way of fashioning the kind of ensemble performance that draws us in by convincing us we're watching behavior, not acting.
the most remarkable debut in recent experience
Too trying to even the most sympathetically disheartened and cynical viewer.
"La Cienaga" literally means the swamp, and the film feels it: a hothouse atmosphere of heat waves and rainstorms and the mired feeling of life stuck in a social bog.
[Martel's] technique works, often brilliantly, in depicting the hyper-real, unsettling atmosphere of a sometimes normal, potentially violent, mostly sick family.
La Cienaga is well worth the trouble finding -- and sitting through -- wherever it plays.
Audience Reviews for La Ciénaga
Super Reviewer
The mother is sick, and so sick of life that she prefers to remain sick in bed rather than keep living like she used to. The father is an detached figure in a corner. The brothers and sisters are, of course, in the wake, the middle, or the end of adolescence, with all its respective problems and dilemmas. The other family contains a shallow, overworking mother, a taciturn, passive father, and their little children.
The Swamp is crowded, and noisy; Lucrecia Martel perfectly translates the sticky and unconfortable sensation of humid hot weather, the smell of wet vegetation, dirty pools, brown-water rivers, and the phony cool of electric fans all over the place. All actors and actresses are excellent in their roles, and it's beautifully shot, making the most out of inanimate objects jus as well as characters doing superficial, day-to-day tasks, to create that unconfortable atmosphere of familiar-but-uncertain. Although it lacks a plot per se, there's an everpresent feeling that what is happening is leading someplace. Martel also masterfully creates sexual tension, loads of it, in a film where no sex takes place whatsoever, and where all the characters are, well, related. Regardless of whether it's awkward, Martel goes for it because it's real.
La Cienaga a slow-paced, rambling study of the human condition that builds tension until the unavoidable ending. GREAT. One of the best Argentinian films I've seen.
Super Reviewer
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Foreign Titles
- The Swamp (La cienaga) (DE)
- The Swamp (La cienaga) (UK)
