Youth culture in global cinema

118 youth and inner-national conflict
Joaquín (Diego Baenas) is a scarred and half-blinded child in La ciénaga.
Through the many scenes in which Momi stands as witness to the actions
of others, La ciénaga suggests that the young girl somehow sees more than
the other characters. Momi is different from her mother, Mecha, whose willful
blindness is symbolized by the sunglasses that she wears inside the house
and by her failure to schedule the cosmetic surgery that would give Joaquín
a prosthetic eye. Momi’s sensorial acuity goes beyond the merely visual. Unlike
her father, Gregorio, and her sister, Vero, both of whom recoil from what
they find to be offensive body odors produced by the oppressive summer
heat, Momi rarely bathes.Told that she smells by others, Momi only showers
after Isabel admonishes her for jumping in the fetid pool. In these and other
ways, Momi functions as a key register of the film’s ‘‘disquieting materiality.’’
As intimated above, one of the most notable means by which the film
creates this sense of density or ‘‘materiality’’ is the sound track. In a recent
interview, Martel underscored the ‘‘youthful’’ perspective produced by the
film’s complex sonic density:
I always felt more confident with the sound than with the image. One
thing that seems important to me about La ciénaga is that although