An early Martel film that has great moments though it's hard to follow the narrative

Argentine director Lucrecia Martel's debut movie, La Cienaga (The Swamp), 2001, is a great movie scene by scene but unfortunately an extremely difficult movie to follow and to hold together in your mind as you watch because of Martel's deliberate eschewing of narrative conventions and of context. The film - more or less about a bourgeois family in a small Argentine city over the course of a few weeks in the summer - has the look and feel of a reality TV program, as if it's unrehearsed and harshly edited giving us the feeling of being voyeurs at the scene of a crash. Over tine, we kind of sense the relationships among the characters and their children, but I was never fully confident that I understood who was who, even at the end. That said, there are some terrific scenes and moments that more than compensate for the narrative difficulty (and in fairness I think the movie would be less challenging for someone who could forego the subtitles). The opening sequence - a bunch of middle-aged people sitting poolside, drinking heavily, while the children cavort, culminating in the mother - who becomes the central figure - stumbling drunkenly and severely cutting herself on a broken cocktail glass - sets the tone for the movie. There's a lot of mistreatment of servants, lack of attention to and supervision of children (an ongoing ominous note that leads to a frightening incident near the end of the film) who spend far too much time playing in the woods with loaded rifles or driving cars and pickups with no licenses and no supervision, petty snobbery, and marital discord. Much of the plot, such as it is, concerns planning a trip for the mother and a sister to Bolivia to buy school supplies at discount rates; the trip never materializes, however - one of the many "empty spaces" in the loose narrative of this film. The concluding ten minutes or so are harrowing, building to a point of crisis that Martel lets just hang in the air, ominous and reverberating. This isn't a film for all viewers, but it does give us insight into Martel's unusual style and significant talent - which really came to light in later work (e.g., The Headless Woman - and does that film pick up on some of the same characters in later life?).