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| Dolores Oliverio, Isabel Bracamonte, Candela Flores in The Virgin Of The Quarry Lake - Laura Casabé: 'I wanted kids who were from the suburbs, that was really important' Photo: Valeria Fiorini/MOSTRA CINE SAS, AJIMOLIDO FILMS SRL, CAPONETO (Beita Producciones SA de CV, MR MIYAGI FILMS |
The Virgin Of The Quarry Lake combines short stories from Argentinian author Mariana Enriquez to unsettling effect to chart a young woman’s jealousies over a hot summer against the backdrop of a crisis in the country. Natalia (Dolores Oliverio) and her friends have been hanging out with the attractive Diego (Agustín Sosa) but Natalia’s romantic aspirations hit trouble when an older woman, Silvia (Fernanda Echeverría) begins to command his attention. As tensions simmer the younger woman’s energies become channelled into something mysterious and dangerous. Director Laura Casabé draws on horror elements but marries them to strong social critique as things reach boiling point.
We caught up with Casabé ahead of the film’s world premiere at Sundance Film Festival when she explained she had long had an interest in Enriquez.
“I was always a big fan of Mariana Enriquez, particularly her books The Dangers Of Smoking In Bed and Things We Lost In The Fire. I wanted to take to the screen to short stories from her. I can completely visualise her stories.
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| Laura Casabé: 'In Mariana Enriquez’s stories, you have reality and the extraordinary and supernatural intertwine in a disturbing way' Photo: Catalina Bartolome |
“I was really moved about the way she understands, in that particular book, genre and the way she wrote and used that language. So I talked to Mariana at that time about maybe making an episodic movie with three three of her short stories and one of them was The Virgin Of The Quarry Lake.
“I wanted the main story to be The Virgin Quarry Lake and then I also wanted to work with a story that I think is great, with the shopping cart (The Cart). I came up with the idea of fusing the stories, but I always thought that The Cart happened during the 2001 in Argentina, but actually the story referred to the crisis of 1989 in Argentina. But I didn’t know that, I thought it was a metaphor of that moment in Argentina that I lived through when I was 19 years old. So I wanted to fuse The Virgin Of The Quarry Lake and The Cart, but also put it in the context of the summer of 2001.”
Although Casabé has previously written her own scripts, including for 2019’s The Return, she says she didn’t want to write the screenplay because it’s not something that she could “purely enjoy”.
She began to talk to Benjamín Naishtat - a writer/director in his own right of films including Rojo - during the pandemic and they became friends through the process of creating the film.
“I told him my ideas and he made the first draft. The thing about Benjamín is that we are both the same age and from Buenos Aires, so we kind of experienced the same things - so we have this big synergy. Then we worked together on the drafts, but he was the one who actually wrote.”
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| Dolores Oliverio as Natalia, 'The thing that I think is great about her is that she didn’t come to be the protagonist of a movie of the stories of Mariana Enriquez, she just came looking for a job' Photo: Leo Furió/MOSTRA CINE SAS, AJIMOLIDO FILMS SRL, CAPONETO (Beita Producciones SA de CV, MR MIYAGI FILMS |
“He is so subtle about it. To talk about the the crisis of 2001 is kind of a delicate thing. But you realise that we experienced the crisis in our everyday lives and that is why it's in the background but it's continually a part of the life of Natalia.”
Speaking about the casting, she adds: “Here in Argentina the good thing is that we have a big theatre tradition. But it was hard because they're really young. Dolores right now is 20, she’s the same age as Natalia.
“I wanted kids who were from the suburbs, that was really important. So we held castings for three months. It was so important to have the group energy. You have a fluid energy between your friends when you are 19 years old. So we had to think about the way they matched each other. We saw 100 girls to play Natalia - and Dolores was the last one. She’s not actually an actress, she’s a dancer, and for me that was the most interesting thing.
“The thing that I think is great about her is that she didn’t come to be the protagonist of a movie of the stories of Mariana Enriquez, she just came looking for a job. She actually lives in the suburbs like the rest of the kids. Then we had two months of rehearsal so by the time we got to the shooting, they had become friends.”
The film has a strong sense of place and some of the imagery that Casabé generates feels tactile - you can also almost smell the place. One of the elements that helps with that is strong sound design, which incorporates weather elements along with disturbing things like the buzzing of flies.
Casabé says: “The sound design for me, is a really delicate thing in genre films. For me, the big reference is Lucretia Martin. In genre, it's really easy to do this thing, for example, something disturbing is going on so we are going to use a drone. But I don’t like it when movies signpost how I should feel. Though Lucretia Martel didn’t make genre movies, the way she designs sound is really interesting, in the way she understands not to be referential. It’s a construction and the way that a thing sounds doesn’t have to be like reality. So for every scene we try to establish a ‘sound language’ that is coherent.
“When Natalia casts the spell on the boyfriend of her grandma, we needed that scene to be intense, so we worked with the editor, Miguel Schverdfinger, who is also the editor for Lucretia Martel. He has a great sound library. This was the first genre movie he had made and we had a lot of fun making it. We thought, okay, we have to make this thing really intense and we have to turn up the tension but we didn’t want to use a drone.
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| Luisa Merelas and Dolores Oliverio as Rita and Natalia. 'We saw 100 girls to play Natalia - and Dolores was the last one.' Photo: Leo Furió/MOSTRA CINE SAS, AJIMOLIDO FILMS SRL, CAPONETO (Beita Producciones SA de CV, MR MIYAGI FILMS |
"So we started to think about the storm. A storm is something that really happens and sometimes the sound of the wind is scary. It feels like something ghostly. We started to be playful but with a lot of respect for what we were doing. We kind of established a language that connected TheChart with the Quarry Lake. Everything that is out of the ordinary is linked by the sound. The Quarry Lake is like the temple of these extraordinary things. We used that kind of raw material to create tension.
“It’s important to me when you do genre to think in that way. You have so many things from real life to use and not just to put a drone or this kind of effervescent design. I think about Martel and David Lynch - the was he uses silence is very interesting, for example.”
It’s interesting that Casabé references “genre” - with a reference to horror - when a lot of it isn’t in that style and is more social realist or coming of age.
She explains: “I call it genre but it’s not a horror movie at all. It's a movie that walks through that frontier. It is a coming of age that fuses at some point with a the language of gener and I don’t want to label this movie - and for me, that’s interesting.”
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| The Virgin Of The Quarry Lake poster |
She adds: “I talk about genre because I do look to take resources from genre. In Mariana Enriquez’s stories, you have reality and the extraordinary and supernatural intertwine in a disturbing way. But everything is mixed up and it’s part of everyday life. It’s like the supernatural leaks through the cracks of reality.”
Enriquez’s style reminds me in some ways of Stephen King and, in fact, The Virgin Of The Quarry Lake is in some ways a spiritual descendent of Carrie as its heroine discovers powers under pressure. One of the ways that Casabé generates tension is through reaction shots to what her characters are doing and she says that’s the reason that she favours long takes when she’s shooting.
She says: “I like long takes, in order to get these expressions. I do not make a lot of takes, I make about five and then I think that if we continue shooting we’ll make a mess. But what I do is that everyone will be ready and I take a long time to say, ‘Action!’ And in that moment something really truthful starts to happen. You have time and at some point you can see them thinking, what’s going on, they don’t know what to do and they start to think through the character. That’s the way for me to shoot, then in the editing you have the takes to work with.”
