The good thing about the London Film Festival is that while Q&As rarely allow time for more than one question—most often none—filmmakers are always kind enough to stick around and chat after the screenings. My second and final ticket for this year’s edition (people who find it hard to get tickets for Wimbledon make me laugh, try the LFF) gave me the chance to speak with one of the most important directors of our time, whose work I’ve admired enormously ever since I came across her magnificent Zama.
So there I was, all ears, the conventional host of congratulators—professional huggers and cheek-kissers—finally subsiding, the underground Q&A for certified disciples just superseding.
A good twenty minutes in, as a point was being made on the thematic parallel between Zama and Nuestra Tierra, I dropped a vaguely philosophical consideration that Lucrecia expanded upon, offering a key not only to her latest, but to her oeuvre as a whole. ‘El problema es de espacio,’ she said, her gaze piercing through the smoked lenses of her characteristic cat-eye frames, ‘ya no de tiempo.’ While time is liable to be manipulated—because it belongs to narration, and narration, technically, is a lie—space is where our identity both as individuals and as groups can still be sought. Perhaps the thread that binds the film, poder is a word she repeatedly used. From the opening view of planet Earth to the granularity of a crime trial, often gliding over the beauty of a seemingly unclaimed territory, Nuestra Tierra feels steeped in a vivid preoccupation with ownership, birthrights, and roots. I found her remark about how drones have come to resonate with military purposes quite chillingly spot-on, and timely. The arresting music that opens the film—as far as I could find, a composition by the Argentine composer Ariel Ramírez—introduces the subject with a sense of mournful sacrality and echoes unresolved, distant issues. The colonial problem, crucial in itself, is transfigured by Lucrecia’s poetics into the existential, reminding us that this is as much about la historia inscribed in the land as it is about the way its people perceive themselves through it. As her recent projects cry out loud, there is something profoundly human, ancestral, and yet pioneering in the urge to reclaim a scale that our era has shrunk to the domestic, the device, or even the virtual.
It was only a bit later, on my solitary walk from the station home, wrapped in the smell of dried leaves and a night not yet too cold, that I realised the question ‘what is land, really?’ was lingering in my mind, somehow intertwined with two images—Don Diego de Zama’s stare towards the end of the ocean and Nuestra Tierra’s breathtaking aerial views of the rural landscape—until a condor snatched the camera and carried it all away, leaving me with an exhilarating kind of meaning I can’t quite articulate, and yet still feels so vivid.
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.
