Whatever summer temperature it is where the average person’s mind begins to warp and melt in the general heat-haze, “The Virgin of the Quarry Lake” is set permanently to that exact degree. You can feel the slow, sweaty adhesion of skin to every surface — or simply to itself — in Argentine director Laura Casabé‘s unusual, genre-fusing debut feature: a would-be summer romance that is repeatedly shaken from its languid, lovestruck daze by stark, uncanny surges of violence. Both a “Carrie”-esque tale of teenage urges so intense they swell into destructive chaos and a snapshot of a mismanaged country reaching a breaking point of public unrest, “Quarry Lake” bears the smart, politically conscious stamp of screenwriter Benjamin Naishtat (the celebrated director of “Rojo” amd “Puan”), though Casabé brings a distinct female gaze to the material.
Quietly frightening in its study of civility being set aside either for reasons of selfish desire or collective rebellion, and touched with a magical realism that doesn’t work in expected ways, “The Virgin of the Quarry Lake” qualifies as a horror film of sorts, though it may disappoint any viewers seeking more straightforwardly visceral genre thrills. It requires careful positioning by festival programmers and potential distributors following its premiere in Sundance’s world cinema competition, but it has the makings of a cult item if found by the right audience. The literary cachet of source author Mariana Enriquez, two of whose neo-gothic stories have been fused in Naishtat’s adaptation, may help in this regard.
It’s the summer of 2001, and the mood in Argentina is febrile and tense, the people’s dissatisfaction with their malfunctioning government steadily building toward the nationwide riots of December that year. Power outages are a daily occurrence, while strangers brawl in the street: The film opens on one such unexplained conflict, setting the tone for the volatile, irregular behavior that ensues. In the dusty suburbs of Buenos Aires, where she lives with her grandmother (Luisa Merelas) after her mother long ago fled to Europe, restless teenager Natalia (striking newcomer Dolores Olivero) is more preoccupied with personal pursuits — specifically Diego (Agustín Sosa), a slightly older boy with taunting come-hither eyes and an anchor tattooed on his neck. Natalia would certainly like to moor him; so too would her friends Josefina (Isabel Bracamonte) and Mariela (Candela Flores), over whom she asserts an assured alpha status.
The summer is young and Natalia’s prospects look strong. Without too much jokey nostalgia, Casabé deftly evokes the rules and rituals of adolescent socializing at the turn of the century, where AIM chatrooms — accessed not on phones but in dingy internet cafés — are formative flirtation spaces, while an invitation to hang out and listen to CDs is, if not one of the bases, at least somewhere on the diamond. Just as Natalia’s seduction strategy is working out, however, along comes Silvia (Fernanda Echeverría), a cool-girl type in her twenties with alleged rock-scene connections and exotic tales of a London gap year, and Diego’s head is instantly turned. Natalia’s immediate loathing of her older love rival is hardly allayed by Silvia’s gestures of friendliness toward the whole group, as she introduces them to an idyllic secret lake made for lazy afternoons of sunbathing and revenge plotting. She will come to regret her generosity.
Natalia’s seething, building jealousy is the driving force of tension in a mood piece that never slackens over 95 minutes, despite the relative lightness of its plotting. Her lust and fury are manifested throughout the film in incidents both everyday and unnerving: a kind of passive telekinesis, perhaps, not least in the case of one grisly hit-and-run accident that she either merely witnesses or wills into being. At a moment where practically everyone in the country is flintily on edge, her possibly supernatural levels of aggression aren’t that easily identified. Olivero’s riveting performance mingles entitled teenage petulance with darker reserves of rage, all crammed behind a feline mean-girl demeanor.
Casabé’s direction likewise balances keen coming-of-age observations — the hormonal highs and humiliations of an all-consuming early crush are evoked with great wit and sensitivity — with a stranger, more inchoate sense of a world slipping out of order. The parched, sunburnt hues of Diego Tenorio’s lensing take on a vivid summer-storm intensity, as the film’s leisurely rhythm seizes and short-circuits: “The Virgin of the Quarry Lake” captures a stretch of both national and individual turmoil, and in the sticky heat of the moment, it’s not clear which is more seismic.
