Lucrecia Martel's "La Cienega" is an utterly boring look at a petit-bourgeois family that is so devoid of life, you wonder why they don't all just jump into a pool of quicksand and drown. There's no vigor or vivacity in any of the scenes or characters, nothing but mundanity. The children have examples of sadism in them, as when they shoot a cow stuck in mud, then they are found roaming the forest doing nothing in particular.
The beginning of the film finds the matriarch boozing it up at the pool with a bunch of equally lethargic friends. She slips and cuts her chest, and that is the major plot point, that and sitting in bed, driving in old jalopy cars, or doing nothing at all. A lot of wine drinking completes the tediously long scenes.
The family lives on some estate somewhere in South America, where Indians are routinely insulted. The Indians are not much better either, going to parties to brawl, or drink or play pool, or hack up some fish in the waters by a dam. You'll have a hard time getting to the end since it drags along.
The children are selfish, spoiled brats. There's no "brilliance" or luminosity in this film at all. The extras include a film by the director Lucrecia Martel, where she boasts about her film. Also some film by the pretentious windbags of the "New Argentine Cinema" is found. A small booklet by another pretentious intellectual, who raves about how great Lucrecia Martel's "La Cienega", is also stuck with the DVD.
So basically we have a bunch of pampered intelligentsia telling us how great these movies are, because we are deemed incapable of analyzing them for ourselves. But don't be fooled, you know when a film is brilliant or not.
This is a thoroughly average film despite what the reviews might claim about it.
The beginning of the film finds the matriarch boozing it up at the pool with a bunch of equally lethargic friends. She slips and cuts her chest, and that is the major plot point, that and sitting in bed, driving in old jalopy cars, or doing nothing at all. A lot of wine drinking completes the tediously long scenes.
The family lives on some estate somewhere in South America, where Indians are routinely insulted. The Indians are not much better either, going to parties to brawl, or drink or play pool, or hack up some fish in the waters by a dam. You'll have a hard time getting to the end since it drags along.
The children are selfish, spoiled brats. There's no "brilliance" or luminosity in this film at all. The extras include a film by the director Lucrecia Martel, where she boasts about her film. Also some film by the pretentious windbags of the "New Argentine Cinema" is found. A small booklet by another pretentious intellectual, who raves about how great Lucrecia Martel's "La Cienega", is also stuck with the DVD.
So basically we have a bunch of pampered intelligentsia telling us how great these movies are, because we are deemed incapable of analyzing them for ourselves. But don't be fooled, you know when a film is brilliant or not.
This is a thoroughly average film despite what the reviews might claim about it.