A sober portrait of middle-class torpor and decadence from director Lucrecia Martel (The Headless Woman, La Nina Santa). Her debut feature offered a glimpse into the dysfunctional class dynamics and tortured race relations of the Argentinian bourgeoisie as two families spend their holiday on a decaying estate in the mountains. However the crowded domestic situation in both homes strains the families' nerves, exposing repressed mysteries, and tensions that threaten to erupt into violence.
Tackling Martel's favoured themes of repression and class guilt, 'La Cienaga' is a fine example of Argentinian filmmaking, offering a refreshing and often humourous riff on the European art-house style, with a debt to the films from the Dogme 95 movement.