听 User Rating 
Argentinian Lucrecia Martel has clearly decided to offer audiences the radnomness of reality, instead of tweaking or distorting it like so many other film makers.
La Ci茅naga contains separate scenes which don't always relate to one another, and in which characters don't exist merely to advance the film. It's a bit like just setting up your camera and hoping that something even semi-interesting might happen. In this film, it never does.
Of course, this being a fiction, there has to be some structure, but it's infuriatingly haphazard and ramshackle. Hampered by her experience as a documentary director, Martel opts to give us the story of two families minus any dramatic frills, so we eventually glaze over as scene after scene informs us that each family member is unhappy.
The film revolves around a matriarchal middle-class family with pretensions but no money. The mother, a dawn-to-dusk drinker who spends each day in a gloomy haze, is all but ignored by a husband who has retreated into the selfishness of his own head. He has lost interest in family life - he does not even know his daughter's age - while she is too drunk to notice. They are visited by her poorer cousin and family, all of whom are by contrast warm and loving, but still ill at ease. The usual teeming rain indicates everyone's misery, while a cow stuck in a swamp symbolises their inability to change. Cheerless, messy, and slack.
In Spanish with English subtitles.
