Joyce Reiser Kornblatt has written: "The sociologists lament the breakdown of the family, but the scientists know: everything breaks down. Cells divide. The entwined strands of DNA separate. Life sunders itself again and again." In her striking debut film Lucrecia Martel charts the fissures in two middle-class Argentinean families during a hot and humid summer.

Mecha (Graciela Borges), her husband Gregorio (Martín Adjemian), and their four children are at their country home. The place is decrepit and the swimming pool a filthy mess. This middle-aged couple has escaped into alcoholism. While taking a tray of empty wine glasses into the house, Mecha stumbles and cuts her chest on the broken glass. She's taken to the hospital for stitches.

Mecha's cousin Tali (Mercedes Moran), her husband Rafael (Daniel Valenzuela), and their four children come for a visit to flee the oppressive heat in La Cienaga. While Tali's sons go hunting in the forest, one of Mecha's daughters thanks God for Isabel (Andrea Lopez), the family's maid. She is very attached to her and quite intrigued with TV reports about a local woman's sighting of the Virgin Mary. When Mecha's eldest son José (Juan Cruz Bordeu) arrives, he goes out dancing, gets in a fight, and has his face badly bruised. The most unfortunate of all the offspring is Tali's youngest boy who is scared out of his wits by a story told about a devouring African rat.

Neither religion, the beauty of the natural world, nor the ties of love can hold these families together. Day by day, they draw further and further apart. Lucrecia Martel's dark drama cuts to the bone with its relentlessly bleak portrait of family life breaking down, life sundering itself again and again.
(Screened at the 39th New York Film Festival)

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