Drawing inspiration from her own large family, Martel sets her story in a hot and humid February mainly in rural northwest Argentina at a country estate, where indolence, self-absorption, sexual longing and easily overlooked youngsters intermingle to create a sense of foreboding that proves prophetic. The film opens strikingly with lots of people, mainly adults sunning themselves around a fetid swimming pool behind a large, rambling Spanish-style house.
The hostess, Mecha Graciela Borges is an attractive but worn middle-aged woman. When she drunkenly stumbles, cutting her upper chest with shards of her broken tumbler, she does not elicit immediate response as she lies prone by the pool.
The slow reaction time to her predicament is unnerving. Mecha is a woman losing her grip as she slips into alcoholism. She has banned her husband Gregorio Martin Adjemian from their bed because his home hair-dye job is rubbing off on the pillows.
No wonder Mecha eagerly suggests that she and Tali go off to Bolivia for a quick vacation, never mind a precarious political situation brewing. Martel eschews exposition entirely, placing considerable demands upon the cast.
Mecha and others are momentarily distracted from their self-preoccupation from a breaking story on TV about a young woman who experiences a vision of the Virgin Mary, who appears to her on the side of a of water tank.
