“I like to believe that we live in a world that our reality cracks and through those cracks, the surreal and the magical leaks and it’s part of our life,” said Laura Casabé, who felt that way growing up in Argentina during the era of extreme austerity after the country was plunged into a Great Depression in 1998. With riots in the streets and the peso devalued to the point of being more useful as a paperweight, it could be wild simply walking around town and it’s why Casabé sparked to the short stories of Mariana Enriquez, who coupled the chaotic moment nationally with the frenzy of being a teenage girl, ultimately fusing together two to make “The Virgin of the Quarry Lake” about a 13-year-old named Natalia (Dolores Oliveros) who doesn’t know how to adjust to the strange times unfolding in front of her.
“The Virgin of the Quarry Lake” opens with the arresting sight of a homeless man being beaten to a pulp in the street that may not be the most brutal element of the scene as it cuts back to a desensitized Natalia, so overwhelmed by competing emotions to feel express any feelings at all. Even if this cacophony didn’t exist exclusively inside her, she’d have it in her ear at all times, living with her largely disapproving grandmother and spending the summer with a pair of friends who both have a crush on Diego, the same guy that she does. Unfortunately for all of them, he is interested in someone slightly older himself as Silvia, who has the additional allure of being well-traveled in her twenties, and Natalia deals with the frustration of being eager for new experiences but not quite old enough to have them, or properly process them if she does. The disillusionment that sets in makes its way into the very fabric of the film as it can be hard to tell what’s real or imagined, but it can be felt as deeply as it all does to Natalia when Casabe has a strong eye and a light touch for what’s stranger than fiction.
Following her 2019 horror film “The Returned,” in which she dug a little deeper into South American history with the tale set a century earlier of a new mother who refused to believe her son was stillborn, Casabé once again employs a unique time in both in history and a young woman’s life to see someone find their footing at a moment when there may be no firm ground to stand on and their perception can be distorted by circumstance as well as the resulting emotions of disbelief or anger. The sensational expression of such torment actually makes her work feel as if she’s ahead of her time and before the premiere of “The Virgin of the Quarry Lake” at Sundance, we were fortunate to catch up with the filmmaker to talk about how she’s made the camera such a potent reflection of her main characters, what it was like finding her poised lead actress Oliveros and why one of the most logistically complicated days of the shoot was actually one of the easier ones.
Before the pandemic, I wrote to Mariana because I always wanted to bring the work of Mariana Enriquez to the screen and my original idea was to work with two of her short stories and to have “The Virgin of the Quarry Lake” as the main story, but to put this story of these teenagers in the context of the 2001 crisis in Argentina. It was a surreal moment [in our country], and also really harsh. Benjamin [Naishat, the screenwriter] and I were actually the age of these teenagers [at the time this was happening], so we experienced the same thing and we were both from the suburbs of Buenos Aires.
There were two things that I wanted to talk about 2001. One was the specific feeling of being 19 years old, which is kind of a frontier because you’ve just ended school and you’re about to start adulthood and I wanted to share how hard that was for us in 2001 and how weird because what we saw all around us was actually falling apart. It was a really harsh crisis, and the social [deterioration] was too fast, so I wanted to tell a coming of age story in that specific moment of our country. Also, I was interested in how to portray 2001 through the eyes of these teenagers and to use the things that happened as raw material to do a genre movie because it was a really violent time. Of course, there were these explosions of violence and the way we lived was so tense, but also weird and funny at some points. It was really chaotic. When you are at that age, it’s so vulnerable, and you’re going through all these emotions. Everything is chaos inside you, so that combination of everything I thought was really interesting.
What was it like to find the right actress to play Natalia?
The casting for Natalia was really long, and here in Buenos Aires, we saw 100 girls and Dolores [Oliverio] was the last one that came. What interested me about her was that she’s not an actress, she’s a dancer and she has this strong presence for the camera. It’s just magnetic and precise. But she wasn’t looking to be the protagonist of the movie. She was just looking for a job. She didn’t know much because she came from another world, and she’s also an English teacher, and I love that because she wasn’t really conscious of what was going on. I also love her low voice and it was interesting what happened [when combined] with that beautiful face and it captivated me immediately. Natalia also is a girl that her family abandoned when she was really a child. She is living with her grandmother, and she’s a kid — she’s really vulnerable — but she had to grow up earlier than most because she has no parents. I saw that in Dolores. She has the Lolita [quality] — she’s beautiful, magnetic, and you see someone that’s really vulnerable, but also you can see in her expression that she has experience in life, that she works for a living and this kind of adulthood in her face. For me, that was key.
And it was a bet because she’s not an actress and she had to work a lot. We had to rehearse for several months and something magical happened because I never got to see her on camera. I watched her through a cell phone [on Zoom], but we were rehearsing a lot and when we did a lens test before the shoot, I remember saying to Diego [Tenorio, the cinematographer], “Let’s do the zoom-in take, and we tried [one particular scene] and we played that shot back and everyone there was [stunned]. It was like, “Wow. she has it. She has the star [quality], the presence. She’s magnetic. That was really wild.
Did she change your ideas of the character once she inhabited the role?
That always happens with actors, but the way I want to understand the actors, I just look for the actor for the character. I don’t think that actors can do anything — maybe there’s a few that actually can really make a really big metamorphosis. But I think the character is calling the actor at some point and maybe this sounds spiritual, but I do believe that is what happened. Then when the actress stepped in to portray the character, I’m really interested in what she has to offer for the character and what I realized for Natalia is the way her experience as a dancer was really interesting for the movement, for the way she stands, for the way she’s looks so confident about herself. That combined with the vulnerability that I knew was in her. She presents herself as an adult and she has everything in control, but she’s not and she wasn’t really conscious about it. We have to work with [Dolores] a lot because she was 18 years old and we worked for two-and-a-half months rehearsing, but Natalia became Dolores at some point and I had to leave the Natalia I had in my mind to start to being Dolores.
The camerawork is really fascinating, almost like it has a mind of its own as it pushes in for a closeup or retracts. How did you figure it out?
Diego Tenorio, the cinematographer, and I have a great synergy. He’s from Mexico and though I’m from Argentina, I do think it’s a generational movie because we were all teenagers during the 2000s and we’re all Latin American, so we inhabit the same reality. We worked a lot on the mise-en-scene and the key word for whole movie is desire. Natalia is a girl overflowing with desire, and we wanted the camera to transmit the point of view of being with her, but not her. So we designed two vectors — one was the [fluid] mis-en-scene and camera for the group [of her friends] because we wanted to capture this flowing energy of a group of friends and being a teenager, where she was more comfortable. And then we thought about another mis-en-scene for the way we portray the other world, the world of the violence and the world where Natalia is really uncomfortable where we thought about a static mise-en-scene, but always with movement.
We wanted to naturalize violence at some point — to be realistic, but a bit stylized — so for that, we wanted something more static and with cuts that were really elliptical to portray the suburbs, but the world [is connected] to the magic and the desire and Quarry Lake and everything should be sexy and you have the camera that flows . And then of course, we have zoom-in, which is like the leitmotif. You can travel into the interior [life] of Natalia, but zoom in the movie is also [how] you come across the portal between reality and the supernatural. Going through that passage is also entering the interior [life] of this hermetic protagonist.
You also had some pretty wild scenes to prepare for, such as a very raucous club scene. What was that like to shoot?
That is funny, because the day before was actually the craziest day for us, the pool scene. Everything came out wrong.
You’d never know it from the final film!
The extras came late, they didn’t know what to do. The place was really big, so we didn’t have time to move from one place to another. We had such a bad day we actually missed a scene. So to do the club scene, it was such a huge [undertaking] we really planned it. First of all, we rehearsed with the actors and I wrote the whole choreography the day before. Then we went to the club, and it was [originally] a sequence shot with cuts, but because I wanted to have the energy flowing in a theatrical way and I didn’t want it to fragmented. Diego [Tenorio, the cinematographer] came in and rehearsed the whole choreography with the camera and then the extras came in and were really great. We rehearsed it again and I directed them because for me giving directions to the extras is important. I treat them like actors. They had really great costumes and we showed the extras the choreography, and then everybody started to do the same thing, like our weird, trashy “Russian Ark.” [laughs] We did the whole take and the take lasts for 10 minutes, but we had a great time. It was one of the best days actually.
What’s it like to get the film to Sundance?
It’s amazing. I actually didn’t think that we were going to get picked and that’s why I sent it. [laughs] Because we ended up with a really rough cut and my producers [said], “We have to send it to Sundance,” and I was so worried about everything that was coming with the sound and everything [else with the post-production], that I said, “Okay, if you want to send it, send it.” And when they told us that we were picked, I couldn’t believe it because for me it’s the most important festival for independent movies. They are so focused on movies and storytelling and it’s beautiful. At first, I thought I cannot believe this, but then I realized maybe this was a nice match because Sundance supports stories that are bold and out of the mold and groundbreaking, and [this movie] I thought [initially] was too weird, but then [I realized] wow, let’s embrace weirdness. You don’t have to go and complete the formula or the conventions of what general movie is. Just go and do it your own way and maybe there’s something there.
“The Virgin of Quarry Lake” will screen at the Sundance Film Festival on January 27th at 8:15 pm at the Egyptian Theatre, January 28th at 3:15 pm at the Broadway Centre Cinemas in Salt Lake City, January 29th at 2:30 pm and January 31st at 5:20 pm at the Megaplex Redstone and February 1st at 6:45 pm at the Holiday Village Cinemas. It will also be available online from January 30th through February 2nd via the Sundance virtual platform.