In this series, in which I talk about directors who I, as the title suggests, just love so much, there’s one gaping hole I need to fill: Lucrecia Martel.
The Argentine director is certainly one who’s earned a real reputation for herself in the arthouse scene, with just a handful of feature-length releases since her debut in 2001, La Ciénaga (The Swamp), but, for me, it’s just not enough. No, I need to tell you why I love her work so much, and try and muster a few more fans so I’ve got more people to talk to about her bizarre, brilliant, beautiful back catalogue.
I first encountered her work via 2017’s Zama, and it’s one of those movies that had me scrambling to find the rest of her work pretty much as soon as the credits rolled. Adapted from the book of the same name by Antonio de Benedetto, this historical drama is almost astonishingly beautiful from shot one – there isn’t a detail here out of place, from the costuming to the performances to the sticky, oppressive atmosphere of18th-century Argentina. It was almost instantly touted as one of the best films of the decade (if not of all time, according to plenty of critics), and it’s easy to see why – it’s a rich, indulgent piece from a visual perspective, so dazzling in its artistry that it’s almost easy to miss the dense, complex story of class and control bubbling beneath the surface.
But, as I delved into more of Martel’s work, that theme of an individual spiralling out against the backdrop of complicated and consuming class dynamics became more obvious to me. Her trilogy of movies set in of Salta follow female protagonists – La Ciénaga in 2001, focused on the exhausted matriarch of a wealthy family over the course of one summer in their decaying rural estate, 2004’s La Nina Santa (The Holy Girl), following a teenage girl navigating her sexuality and spirituality, and La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman) in 2008, which tracks the spiral of a middle-class woman after she comes to believe she killed someone in a car accident. They’re all relatively small stories that swell to consume the lives of the women at the centre of them, commanding attention and obsession as small details and incidences spiral into enormous consequences buoyed by the simmering social stew around them.
And, more specifically, her films explore with such deftness what it means to be a woman against the various oppressive social backdrops she utilizes for her stories. I don’t care how many times you’ve heard it already, but women-centric cinema is still painfully lacking. So often, and especially at the time Martel came into her own as a filmmaker, it feels like women are a genre unto ourselves, that women’s stories are enough of a shift from the mainstream as to not call for further cinematic exploration – making a story about women is weird enough, let alone exploring it in an artistic and challenging way.
But Martel is doing her bit to fix that, with these surreal, complex and challenging stories that centre women and their unique experiences, as children, as teenagers, as wives, mothers, adults, matriarchs and innocents, her style a reflection of the expanse and contradictions within women’s experiences. She’s a force of cinema in general, but a force for women in cinema specifically, and that’s what forever keeps me obsessed with her movies.
Have you seen any of Lucrecia Martel’s movies? What’s been your experience with her work? Let me know in the comments below!
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By Lou MacGregor
(header image via Slant)
No But Listen 