Lucrecia Martel is one of the best filmmakers alive. Though her work isn’t yet widely available in the States, for me, her voice has become a powerful companion in navigating this American political climate. Her films principally deal with examining the Argentinian bourgeoisie and the effects of colonialism and power on the privileged themselves. That description: extended focus on privilege, may sound heavy-handed or even exasperating. But I suspect this has to do with the way many lauded films in the States around said political topics tend to desensitize.
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Martel’s films, much like the sound-rich work of Thai auteur Apichatpong Weerasethakul, have the opposite effect: they are an immersive sensory experience. They, by design, invigorate. Her debut feature La Ciénaga conjures a palpably swampy ambiance befitting its title: ceilings drip, floors run and scenes melt together, like visual and sonic cues that aspire toward aroma. Even, its “plot” leans toward formlessness.
The film observes a wealthy family that clings to the remains of their upper-class luxury as their bodies and environment deteriorate. Their sluggish attempts to sunbathe, holding glasses encrusted with drying legs of wine, are inscribed with denial. This opening scene is interrupted by a rainstorm, and the matriarch of the household Mecha (played by a virtuosically inelegant Graciela Borges) cuts herself on dropped wine glasses and requires her servants’ aid. She’s unsurprised that they rush to her side, but she’s irritable with them, and at the sheer fact she needs them.
In retrospect, the scene’s portrait is stark: powerful people, injuring themselves on their own mismanaged excess, their comfort ruined by the turning weather they tried to ignore, and bourne up by those they boss and belittle. Salta, Martel’s province, is a microcosm of Argentina, yes, but it could easily be a diorama of American opulence and ignorance.
The difference in Martel’s critique of self-made malaise is that she portrays her subjects not as political caricatures, but as a mosaic of environmental echo and ebb: the feeling of damp on skin, a whiff of petrichor. Many criticize this film for its repelling esotericism, but I find it strangely satisfying that it suggests the earth is itself ultimately resisting and reclaiming its occupied land.
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Sound artist Lawrence English said, “I am interested in the idea of the body as an ear. I want to explore the point at which our audition becomes synesthetic.[1]” Martel similarly is concerned with sensory cooperation. Her films subtly encourage alertness—awareness of details, which the body, through united means of investigation, can unveil.
Martel’s The Headless Woman hides critical signals in plain sight, like clues. The film is set up like a tale of espionage: a wealthy woman, Verónica (María Onetto), takes a drive one night and hits something with her car. Flustered, she drives on. The camera lingers on Onetto’s profile as she attempts to mentally detach herself from what happened. A small handprint is barely visible on the car’s window. All we hear are the rough miles passing and her irregular breathing, but the unacknowledged past swells and possesses her. Slowly, a patchwork cover-up ensues, though Verónica’s detachment, confusion and dread only intensify.
Martel’s latest masterpiece, Zama, adapts a novel by Antonio Di Benedetto and follows the winding efforts of Don Diego de Zama. He’s a kind of custodian of the Spanish colonization, caught in a bureaucratic loop that’s marooned him in Paraguay doing jobs he doesn’t favor. The opening scene finds him standing on a shoreline, in an outfit and pose reminiscent of Columbus hagiography. He spies on some native women bathing in mud, and when called out, he runs. One woman chases him and grabs his arm. After flailing a few moments, he grabs her back and slaps her face. We see his flaws laid out immediately: he’s a temperamental and violent coward, using his diminishing status to oppress in meaningless ways that are doomed from the start. In his pursuit of more savory positions, he chases an impossible relationship with a coquettish aristocrat, Luciana Piñares De Luenga. Their conversations take place in cramped rooms, outfitted in aspirant rococo trappings that can’t stave off the climate. Their wigs and ruffled collars are sweat-stained and askew. Indigenous servants are ever present in the shadows, and the fans they constantly pump creak and screech throughout the Spaniards’ chatter. The servants are always just out of frame, but they are dead center in the viewer’s consciousness. A recurring sound motif is linked with the character of Zama. Known as the Shepard tone, it’s an auditory illusion of pitch that feels perpetually descending. Sonically, his nose-diving ethos quite literally seems bottomless.
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In trusting our attention, Martel’s films draw viewers into the practice of attention. This is part of her avant-garde storytelling’s seduction: it is a dare, hinging on our possible transformation. The viewers are made aware of their own somatic relations and limitations: we may want to inhale the swamp’s miasma, but leaning in does nothing. We often notice a face in the periphery, behind the in-focus, lighter-skinned lead, but the stories behind those specific faces are rarely spotlit. Martel has our senses inclined toward these decentralized stories, but she does not provide us with much information, besides the evidence that the stories exist all around her leads. We must carry this hunger for the whole story into the real world. Martel accomplishes that elusive miracle of filmmaking, where the most inescapable images are the ones she refuses to show: images we know, in our bodies, are nonetheless there.
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Her critical approach to her lead characters, and the structures they represent, is particularly sharp. She’s committed to humanizing them and to drawing out her viewers’ awareness of themselves—though she’s not out to engender pity. For a while, a dominant trope in U.S. programming was the anti-hero. Typically white and male, this specter was conjured allegedly in the conceit of critique: the idea was that the portrayal of monstrosity could wake viewers to the fact that we all could be monstrous. Yet, many viewers became fascinated with the intrigue of transgressive behavior. In the end, these characters were often seen to be nearly or entirely heroic. Breaking Bad’s Walter White, Mad Men’s Don Draper or The Wolf of Wall Street’s Jordan Belfort may be frightening only to those who already understand the corrosive effects in a cocktail of hyper-masculinity, egoism, venture-capitalist addiction and privilege. To others, the trope becomes an intoxicating drink of choice.
Meanwhile, Walter White’s wife Skyler gets named TV’s “Most Hated Character” for a time, her crime being merely her levelheaded opposition to her husband’s escalating brutality (or badassery, to his fans). Many judge those who oppose Belfort’s behavior as being square. Odious power, it seems, in the hands of most American filmmakers is difficult to represent without it being eclipsed by glamor. We are swept up in it, so is a measured awareness of ourselves. We tend to disappear in the spectacle’s light: an adagio of the central characters’ ruthlessness, the point of which is to thrill. We are always safely removed from, and better than, these anti-heroes. This is precisely because we desire to be them (but only in fiction, and thus we are not them), or else we despise them (when they are painted as inhuman, and thus unreal). When the attempted critique of privilege and imperialist affluence is only partially exposed, that power retains its erotics. Martel doesn’t seek to be seen as the conductor of a single story. She circles, scene to scene, film to film, around the phenomenon of colonialism. While the movie is gorgeous, the image of privilege is uncommonly honest, fully exposed and undesirable.
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One may hope the current administration is displaying the death knells of a particular kind of white-supremacist, patriarchal capitalism that’s been naturalized in the States. The earth, in turn, is displaying critical signals of its own grave peril. On one hand, Martel’s characters embody the decay of privilege, which can be a balm. At the same time, these results do not feel inevitable—especially considering how Zama begins in 1790, just a year after George Washington was inaugurated and the Supreme Court established. As in the work of Claire Denis, Martel’s elliptical story format suggests that resolution is not always legible. Or she questions the idea of resolution itself. Martel traces a history of colonialism: shapeshifting, seeming to die, but failing to disappear entirely. In this way, her oeuvre is like an orrery of how Fate deals with imperialism. It is also a reminder to listen: to the land, to the pastiche of indiscernible noises, to what we may rarely practice listening to. Martel has commented that Zama, “without the sound, is an absolute disaster. There are many things that only work because of the sound design.”[2] In strictly the attentiveness sense of the word (versus its auditory sense), this cooperative experience of listening beyond convention yields beauty and meaning to her films—and it works a similar magic everywhere else, if we sit in her exercise and more fully notice what is before us. When images blur, converge and disorganize, we can gain our bearings through our commitment as receptors of what is both real and typically hidden. This, to me, feels like reality: a world that only holds together if we listen.
[1] English, L., (2015, July 30). Lawrence English; Our Relationship to Sound is Problematic (K. Hennessy, Interviewer). The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2015/jul/30/lawrence-english-our-relationship-with-sound-is-problematic
[2] Martel, L., (2017, Sept. 26). Interview: Lucrecia Martel (J. Teodoro, Interviewer). Film Comment. https://www.filmcomment.com/blog/interview-lucrecia-martel/