A summer on the brink of collapse from the perspective of Lucrecia Martel's film La ciénaga (The Swamp)

It's summer, it's hot and the humidity is in the air. The silence enhances the ambient sounds and the creaking of the metal chairs on the floor.

The pool is full, the wine glasses empty and the breeze feels close.

In the middle of a day in the countryside, two Argentinean families meet, and a story like no other begins in the first film of the prestigious Lucrecia Martel, “La ciénaga” (The Swamp).

There are films that take me back to the summer, but none of them brings me as close to what I know as this one. A film that takes place one summer afternoon in Salta, a province often forgotten by the Argentine audiovisual industry.

La ciénaga, a film released in 2011 and acclaimed worldwide, marked a before and after in cinema, positioning itself as a work within the new Argentine cinema.

Martel moves away from classical structures and presents a murky and profound x-ray of the decadence of an upper middle-class family trapped in its own inertia in the province of Salta. With a fragmentary structure, floating characters and a suffocating summer as a backdrop, the film becomes a distorted (but faithful) mirror of Argentine society.

The aesthetics of abandonment: narrative and aesthetic significance

In a semi-abandoned (not to say humble) house, a dysfunctional family lives a summer of heat, humidity and tension.

In the northwestern region of Argentina, Mecha (Graciela Borges) lives with her husband and several of her teenage children. The story begins when Mecha suffers a domestic accident in the garden pool, dirty and moldy, cuts herself on the glass and has to be moved, forcing her to remain bedridden. Meanwhile, her cousin Tali (Mercedes Morán), with a big family and economic problems, tries to maintain a daily life that is also crumbling. The conflict, however, is never presented in a direct way: everything is mediated by silences, latent tensions, out-of-field and an elliptical narrative structure.

Between religious festivities, torrential rains, dying animals and inert bodies, the film builds a dense, suffocating and disturbing atmosphere.

At the same time, the house is a key witness to the decline not only of the family, but also of Argentina at that time.
The house in the city is more modest, also representing the fact that the characters are trapped in time and space, in a deadly summer.

Unlike Tali, Mecha does not leave her room, but she distances herself from Tali's commitment to her home.

The only possibility of breaking out of this situation (a trip to Bolivia seen as a liberating moment) will ultimately be frustrated.

Mecha's house is mired in a deep litany; its inhabitants wander aimlessly through it, moving from room to room and throwing themselves indiscriminately onto the unmade beds they find in their path. Tali's family, on the other hand, is noisy and the house is always bustling. The children run around shouting and Tali moves continuously amid the general disorder. In this case, it is the constant movement and incessant ambient noise that create the suffocating and oppressive atmosphere.

Outdoor spaces involved in the story, the mountains and the city, are also tinged with a claustrophobic atmosphere. The hill, for example, is shown from the inside as a colourful space saturated with vegetation, and from a distance, through wide shots in which it is seen in the middle of a misty sky, enveloped in the threatening sound of thunder. The story also uses photography to add clues that contribute to the construction of the threatening atmosphere.

Between religious festivals, torrential rains, dying animals and lifeless bodies, the film creates a dense, suffocating and disturbing atmosphere.

The constantly danger

The colours in this film function as connotations in the story.
The green of nature, also reflected in the dampness of the walls, does not only speak of this, but also refers to the social and spiritual decay in which they live.
Red is the first colour that appears at first glance, creating a link between the wine, the dirty glasses and the blood covering Mecha's chest after the accident. The atmosphere and the threat are tinged with that colour from the beginning.
Among the connotations usually attributed to red are blood, threat and danger. Corroborating this series of associations, in the background of the film, a low-angle shot magnifies the presence of red peppers drying in the sun.

The film has low-contrast, low-saturation photography. There are no bright colours or strong saturations; even when "warm" tones such as red or orange appear, they are dirty, worn out, weighed down by heat and dust.

The weather conditions: it is summer, there are power cuts, rain, extreme heat. The outside world offers no relief. The colour is an extension of the discomfort; it is summer, it is hot, there are power cuts, and yet it also rains. The weather offers no respite, and the use of colours reinforces this idea.

Aesthetics of heat and summer: body, time and stagnation.

“I didn’t want to tell a story, but rather evoke an atmosphere.” – Lucrecia Martel

In cinema, summer is generally used as a season surrounded by adventures, vacations, friends and romances. However, summer in La ciénaga is much more than a season: it is a dramatic device that intensifies the sense of confinement, fatigue and deterioration. The humidity and heat that fills every space, the rain and the desire.

Summer is also presented through the use of sound (fans, insects, rain, dishes) and image (closed shots, partial framing, earthy colors) transforms the environment into another character that gives no respite, the heat is stable in the environment, in the dialogues and even in the very skin of the characters who perspire even in the shade.

The swimming pool functions as the central metaphor of the story: stagnant, dirty, covered with leaves, it represents the state of the family and, by extension, of the Argentine middle class: unable to clean, to move forward, to change. A family that only survives the summer.

Heat and bodily inertia: bodies are sweaty, asleep, lying down. There is no action, only passivity. Time dilates and the story is suspended.

This sensory aesthetic refers to the "cinema of experience" (Sobchack, 1992), where the corporeal and perceptual replaces the classical narrative progression.

Summer does not symbolise joy, adventure or enjoyment; it is the eternal wait for something that will never come, an eternal siesta where no one wakes up, the incessant use of the fan in the bedroom.

The fallen bodies; Mecha wounded, the children lying down, the adults always reclining: the bodies are immobile, passive, as if time were not passing.

The importance of off-screen space:

Off-screen space is used to build tension, moments that overwhelm the viewer and allow them to think or question things. Where is that sound coming from? What is happening?

Deleuze points out that off-screen can designate "(...) what exists elsewhere, beside or around", or account for “(...) a more disturbing presence, which cannot even be said to exist, but rather 'insists' or 'subsists', a part".

In Martel's film, what does not appear in the shot is worked from this second line. In the scene where the children decide to shoot the cow sinking into the swamp, Tali's young son, Luciano, stands right in the line of fire. The other children say to him, 'Move, Luciano, get out of the way'. In the next shot, we see the hill from a distance, in a long shot, and we hear the shot. For a moment, the viewer does not know if the boy has finally moved out of the way of the shotguns. Without reaching the dramatic intensity of this scene, the film uses the same technique at other moments, for example, when Momi throws herself into the pool full of mouldy water. She is seen sinking silently before the eyes of the others, but she never comes out. The elision of that moment raises, at least, a question about what happened, which is dispelled by the appearance of the young woman sitting next to the pool. On the other hand, the two events that function as significant dramatic nuclei—Mecha's fall at the beginning of the film and Luciano's death at the end—occur off-screen.

Sound as the central character of the story.

In La ciénaga, sound is not subordinate to image, but is as important as or even more important than what is visible. Martel constructs a dense and saturated soundscape that, in many cases, is more relevant than what is happening on screen. This choice intensifies the unease, discomfort and latent tension.

The first indication that sound is fundamental comes at the beginning, when chairs are dragged across the floor and the metallic sound disturbs the viewer and makes their hair stand on end, almost like the constant hum of fans in the middle of summer.

The sound of the forest serves another important function: the animals and the impending storm can be heard.

There is no silence; all spaces are surrounded by sounds and noises: the heat, the decay of the house and the forest are under constant threat from something that is not visible to the naked eye. Therefore, the sound functions as a premonition or warning of a threat, anticipating what we cannot see or creating a hostile atmosphere that envelops the viewer. Before Mecha's accident (when she falls on the broken glass), there is no music to set the scene. However, the ambient sound—the humidity, the tension in the voices, the clumsy movement of the bodies—creates a sense of imminence.

The cacophony of the domestic and the natural.

Martel mixes domestic sounds (glasses, plates, footsteps, murmurs, fans) with sounds from the forest (thunder, crickets, frogs, wild animals), blurring the boundaries between the human and the natural, the civilised and the wild.
This creates an ambiguous atmosphere, where everything seems out of control. The house is not a refuge, but is as invaded by the jungle as it is by family tensions.

Martel uses the off-screen space as a disturbing zone. What we do not see, but hear or sense, becomes more powerful than what is visible.
For example, the sounds of children running through the jungle or playing with weapons, animals bursting onto the scene, or the cries of characters who are not in the frame. All of this suggests a latent presence that goes beyond the image.

The off-screen also has an ideological dimension. The bodies we do not fully see—domestic workers, indigenous people, animals—are part of the same narrative universe, but they are relegated or marginalised from the frame.

This situation can be interpreted as a commentary on the invisibility of certain social groups in the Argentine family and social structure. What remains outside the image is as important as what is shown.

Off-screen and temporality.

Sometimes, what is outside the frame is not happening now, but belongs to another temporal or emotional dimension. Martel constructs a perception of time in which the boundaries between the present, the past and desire are blurred, and the off-screen contributes to this indeterminacy.

The breakdown of the middle class

From a sociological perspective, La ciénaga functions as a critique of the provincial, white, upper-middle class, heir to colonial structures. Mecha's family represents a class that lives in the past, sustained by inherited privileges, but with no plans for the future.

Structural racism: the relationship with domestic employees (of indigenous origin) reveals a naturalised hierarchy. They are invisible, mistreated or infantilised.

Decadent patriarchy: adult males are absent or nullified. Women sustain the household through neurosis and resignation.

Religious crisis: the feast of the Virgin is shown as an empty performance that no longer connects with the spiritual.

In Pierre Bourdieu's terms, we could think that this family inhabits an anachronistic "habitus" that no longer fits social reality, and that is why it breaks down.

In its symbolic dimension, La ciénaga represents Argentina as a country trapped in its own history, unable to clean its pool or rebuild its social ties.

Predicting the 2001 crisis: the film is a prophetic portrait of the social, political and cultural collapse that would manifest itself in December of that year.

Immersion in immobility: as Martel says, "La ciénaga is a place you can't leave," and in conclusion, it is also a latent state for a society that, despite its changes, often remains static and overflows in the middle of summer.