Sep 072012
 

Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel’s “Pescados” (“Fish”) absurdly wonders what fish’s dreams are made of through a pool of carp who dream of driving in a car in the rain, but – and this seems the essential point – without dogs.

The frame of the film is crowded with bobbing carp of various sizes and colours that strain to reach for food at the top of an aquarium or a zen koi pond. Through their various tones of voice we detect differences in character between the fish as they blather in their invented language. Even without the sound, the anthropomorphized carp have personalities detectable in the way they treat other fish, nudging them out of the way, and swimming on top of them.

The strange and haunting sounds are a hallmark of Lucrecia Martel’s film style. The fish are granted the gift of semi-individuality through the sounds that they are associated with, depending on whether that sound is shriller or deeper. They speak in individual voices but with overlapping sounds. This is not the story of one fish, but a community. Schools of fish usually perform in perfect synchronicity but Martel’s carp react fitfully. As in her previous films (both feature-length and shorts), she is highlighting the individual’s comportment within a greater group.

The sounds, synchronized perfectly to the gaping fish mouths, are by Argentinean multidisciplinary artist Juana Molina. The noises are not from an easily recognizable instrument, but those who know Martel’s body of work will hear similarities to the device prominently featured in her second feature film, The Holy Girl. There is a sound like the theremin, an electronic instrument that is played without a touch. Molina is electro-folk musician who is also an actress and she cites Bjork as one of her influences. The connections between the two artists’ styles are unmistakable.

Martel is the well-known director of serious character studies like The Headless Woman and The Swamp, so her focus here on chatty sing-song fish might seem peculiar. Animal adventures are usually the stuff of Disney’s children’s films, rarely of prize-winning independent filmmakers and they feature elaborately drawn characters, not real live fish. In Finding Nemo (2003), the clown fish Nemo and his various friends tell us their story in their own words;Martel’s fish do so as well.  Nemo’s tale is more canonical, a simple father and son tale, while Martel’s story resists making the same kind of sense. The anthropormorphic turn seems to flirt with a more complex ontological project. Her last short, Muda, also featured on Numero Cinq at the Movies, featured humans acting like insects. Both these films suggest Martel is exploring the boundaries of the human experience, possibly intending to denaturalize desire and identity through these animalistic turns.

Simplicity has been a crucial characteristic of Martel’s films since the beginning of her successful filmmaking career. In this short, in the dominant fish pond scenes, her camera zooms in and out on the fish in one continuous dance. The frame is always densely filled and this allows for shots of a single humanized fish or a more complete view of the pond, with multiple fish. The carp mesmerize with their ceaseless irregular movements. Splashing water, wavelets, and silver coins at the bottom of the pond catch the light, saturating the captured image again and again.

Martel bookends these vibrant pond scenes with POV shots of a passenger or driver in a car driving on a highway in the rain. In the first, the title shot, we see a greenish rainy dusk with a lot of sky. Martel builds dramatic tension in this section of the short, despite the absence of other characters, through the eerie colour and the car we see in the distance. This first sky scene is intermittently interrupted by what we assume to be the windshield wipers; they are at the same time nuisance and godsend, since they temporarily block our view but ultimately allow us to see through the windshield.

The water from the fishpond is contrasted with the rain on the windshield (reassuring for the fish, one would suppose). Water is a prominent feature in all of Martel’s feature films, but usually it is the characters that use the medium in some way. In this case, it is unconceivable that she would film fish without the liquid. In The Swamp, it was an oppressive element present in the air (heavy humidity) and in the family’s pool (where ultimately, the dramatic twist happens). In The Holy Girl, it was an element that allowed various morally ambiguous characters to wash away their possible sins.

From the dark threat of the highway in the rain, she moves us suddenly to the cacophony of the fish in the pond. Martel’s contrast of the effervescence of the fishpond and the dark starkness of the highway scene is unexpected, a difficult clash of images to process. At 1:39, she offers us another two-second flash of the road, as a convoy of transport trucks pass to the left of the screen in rapid succession. Now that we know the fish, know of their dream, we are left to wonder if this is the car the fish dream about and what will happen to this car full of fish driving down the highway? The short ends with a return to the highway footage, the bottom darkness of the koi pond transitioning into the view through the windshield as the fish fade and swim away to the exterior shot and the round shiny coins become the street lamps flashing by. Still, our questions remain unanswered. We’ll never know where the carp wanted to go on their road trip, what is so terrible about dogs, or why they would ever want to leave the gloriously manic pond.

This short film is rife with planes of observation, one of Martel’s favourite tropes. We view the film, the car driver looks out the windshield, the camera watches the fish, and all the fish look out of the bowl. Martel requires of her viewers that they gaze, stare, and look again and again.  She perhaps does this best in her last feature film, The Headless Woman. In one continuous scene, we must watch the facial expressions of the main character as she goes through multiple emotions realizing, then discarding, the possibility that she may have hit a person with her car on the road. Watching a Martel film, we must discover and question the smallest of details or facial expressions.

In an perfect twist, given Martel’s preferred tropes, the filmmaker can be (barely) distinguished in a reflection in the koi pond, especially in the tight shots when there are few carp movements. We guess that she is there, a square black likeness, holding the camera, controlling what we see. But she and the film’s meaning remain elusive, a reflection, yet promissory.

This short was presented at the Jameson Notodofilmfest, an annual online festival born in 2001 from an idea by Javier Fesser, an Oscar-nominated filmmaker (2007). This festival allows young innovative filmmakers to present their work through the magical world of the interweb. The prestigious jury members contribute to widening the selection of shorts; Lucrecia Martel was a judge for the 8th edition of the festival.

— Sophie M. Lavoie

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Sophie M. Lavoie conducts research in the areas of women’s writing and social change in Central America and the Caribbean. Her studies focus on women in contemporary Nicaragua during the first Sandinista era (1970-1990), but she is also interested in other revolutionary movements in the area, such as Cuba and El Salvador and in women’s writing in Latin America. Her current research project focuses on the link between women’s writing, empowerment, and revolutionary action during the Sandinista era in Nicaragua. She has published articles in Canadian Women’s Studies/les cahiers de la femme, Pandora, Centroamericana, Cahiers d’Etudes Romanes and Descant. She is Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, NB where she teaches Spanish and Latin American Cinema.

Mar 292012
 

Horror and fashion are interwoven in Lucrecia Martel’s “Muta,” a commercial and short film hybrid with a subtle and disturbing story that blurs the line between repulsion and beauty.

The clothing company MiuMiu commissioned the piece for a unique short film project called The Women’s Tales. It is difficult to find information on the origins of The Women’s Tales project, but it seems that the founder of MiuMiu, Miuccia Prada (yes, that Prada family), selected Lucrecia Martel for this project after a conversation. Two other younger women directors Zoe Cassavetes (USA, born in 1970) and Giada Colagrande (Italy, born in 1975) have also been selected. The films have been projected during fashion events held by MiuMiu and are being featured on the company’s website.

In her films, Lucrecia Martel likes to make her audience uneasy, thematically, visually and acoustically. In The Holy Girl, for example, her chosen story-line seeks to create discomfort, agitation, and questioning by focusing on a pedophilic predator and his relationship with an adolescent victim-turned-stalker.  Martel’s visual language choices add to this uneasiness through her signature cryptic yet profound qualities. Her keen gaze focuses on details, she directs the camera with precision, and allows us the time, as viewers, to find those telling expressions, minute shapes and textures that she wants to feature in her work. Furthermore, the sounds she uses tell another conflicted and unsettling story as they often originate off-camera or don’t match the image being seen – we can’t help but be disturbed by the collision of the two contrasting senses.  Wear headsets and turn up the sound to truly appreciate the subtle layers of her storytelling.

Martel’s choice of title is interesting. Perhaps in her research, Martel found out that Miuccia Prada had been a mime for the years following her PhD in political science. “Muta” means mute or voiceless in Italian: the characters in this short film do not speak in a manner that is intelligible; they don’t use a comprehensible language and the sounds they produce are not subtitled. What was that mumbling? Did I hear a word? A series of unintelligible and incoherent sounds create constant speculation for the audience. Martel uses all her artistry to create a soundscape that intrigues, often recalling sounds we rarely hear but associating them with something more familiar: the fluttering of a butterfly’s wings as we see a close-up of a long fluttering fake eyelash.

Ultimately, words would be superfluous to an understanding the story. Unlike in this year’s Best Film at the Oscars (The Artist), even facial expressions are not necessary for us to feel something and react to the film.

“Muta” borders on the genres of science fiction and horror, but both in subtle ways. The setting of Martel’s film is a strange yet familiar world where something perhaps apocalyptic has happened, recalling the mutations in the original 1958 The Fly by Kurt Neumann (remade by David Cronenburg in 1986). Has the human race in the future been hybridized through genetic mutations? Is the world inhabited by anonymous leggy creatures recalling stick insects? Regardless, the first and last shots that frame Martel’s film are of buzzing insects above water, at dawn and dusk.  This busyness in the opening scenes contrasts with the stark shots that will follow but will echo the presence of the insects – something inhuman haunts the entire film.

The film is a sort of self-contained drama (used in theatre, the French term “huis clos” captures this much better) that starts with the first scene, as we discover that the setting will be an opulent ship gliding on a river (filmed on a river in Paraguay). This scene is beautifully shot, presenting an idyllic sunrise that in no way warns us of what is to happen. In Spanish and Italian, “muta” comes from the verbs to moult or to mutate, but was also used in the past as a noun to describe a pack of dogs. Indeed the characters in the story act and react like a pack.

Like cockroaches (or praying mantises, given their extra long model legs), they hatch on the boat, unfolding awkwardly, emerging from the concealed wall storage units. Martel speeds up and slows down their actions to make their emergence seem all the more uncomfortable for the models, and uncanny for the spectator.

The beings are dressed in MiuMiu’s beautiful 2011 collection, including the accessories, which are prominently displayed. This was the designer’s only constraint on Martel’s creativity –the use of her clothing collection. Their bodies, as they do strange things like eating paper, seem alien and insect-like. The mysterious hierarchy that governs them dictates that they should fumigate (or sterilize?) certain members of the pack while wearing bulky gas masks. But they also get to enjoy a party where they drink green slimy chemical cocktails. We see them react to situations with base emotions but never really understand why. With the absence of words and facial expression, we must rely on body language to understand the characters.

Martel’s work is also profound in that it captures and parodies the very essence of the fashion industry it is supposed to represent. Faceless models play the characters who only serve as functioning mannequins in a drama that eventually eliminates them from the equation:  the bodies, reduced to hangers for the company’s clothes, disappear at the end of the film, leaving behind the sheaths and adornments that had served them. MiuMiu’s 2011 collection is shown off, central to the story, but eventually discarded. How fickle the fashion world!

Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel (born in 1966) is already a household name for fans of Latin American cinema. She has become the protégée of Spain’s Pedro Almodóvar and has released a dozen shorts and a trilogy of successful feature films: The Swamp (2001), The Holy Girl (2004) and The Headless Woman (2008). Martel has received awards at many festivals around the world and the last two films were nominated for the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival. The short film Muta (2011) might make her a household name in another circle, that of fashion.

— Sophie Lavoie

Sophie M. Lavoie conducts research in the areas of women’s writing and social change in Central America and the Caribbean. Her studies focus on women in contemporary Nicaragua during the first Sandinista era (1970-1990), but she is also interested in other revolutionary movements in the area, such as Cuba and El Salvador and in women’s writing in Latin America. Her current research project focuses on the link between women’s writing, empowerment, and revolutionary action during the Sandinista era in Nicaragua. She has published articles in Canadian Women’s Studies/les cahiers de la femme, Pandora, Centroamericana, Cahiers d’Etudes Romanes and Descant. She is Associate Professor at the University of New Brunswick in Fredericton, NB where she teaches Spanish and Latin American Cinema.