THE STORY – A male professor at a university finds himself in conflict with his own roles as a husband, father and teacher. An eventual relationship with a female student highlights his crisis. A female professor, also in crisis, has a relationship of her own with a male student. Both must face their respective consequences head-on, struggling against gender expectations and the weight of their secret lives.
THE CAST – Marina de Tavira, Joaquín Furriel, Alfonso Tort, Romina Peluffo, Emanuel Parga & Verónica Gerez
THE TEAM – Celina Murga (Director/Writer), Juan Villegas & Lucía Osorio (Writers)
THE RUNNING TIME – 114 Minutes
Lust is like poison. It’s menacing, and once it makes its way into our bloodstream, it’s only a matter of time before it takes over our faculties and places us in positions we never thought possible. It’s the daredevil of all sensations, a drug that intoxicates us like a bolt from the blue; only it can often be more threatening than beneficial. It can damage our lives, our minds, and our hearts, not to mention what it can do to others. Yet sometimes, there’s nothing that can free us from its grasp. It takes hold with a stiffness – pause – that is inescapable. It hurts, but is it painful enough to make us flee? Or is the high it provides worth the risk of its captivity?
Such are but some of the questions raised by Celina Murga’s “The Freshly Cut Grass,” a thoughtful, if repetitive, drama that inspects relationships of all kinds. It studies the dynamics between husbands and wives, parents and children, employees and employers, et al. But its principle dissection is of the student-teacher bond, a connection often conducted with intimacy from a relative distance, unlike other affairs (the film’s operative word, no less). Murga sets her attention on Pablo (Joaquín Furriel) and Natalia (Marina de Tavira, who received an Oscar nomination for her work in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma”), two agronomics professors at a university in Buenos Aires who find themselves tangled in romantic liaisons with students in their classes despite both being married with children. Their lives seem to be stuck in traffic jams further marred by molasses coating the highways; these secretive rendezvous seem to be more about feeling something, anything than they do individual last resort.
It’s apparent from the jump that both Pablo and Natalia are unhappy. However, it’s the husbands in both relationships – Alfonso Tort plays Natalia’s husband, Hernán, while Pablo is married to Carla (Romina Peluffo) – that are relatively disengaged with their spouses. They rattle off “whatever you prefer” and “It doesn’t matter to me” as if it were occupational. Pablo and Hernán are passengers in their relationships, drifting through life with impassion and apathy (That is, of course, unless sex is offered). They face opposite walls from their partners when they sleep; they snap at the slightest disagreement; they bicker for the sake of it as though it’s the one thing that will inject some fire or intensity into their lives. Merely being married isn’t doing the trick. It’s not that their wives aren’t participants in this passivity, just that they aren’t operating on the same playing fields.
Enter Gonzalo (Emanuel Parga) and Luciana (Verónica Gerez), students who offer forbidden fire to Pablo and Natalia’s lives. Gonzalo is handsome, helpful, and fierce; Luciana is intelligent, amorous, and dangerous. The presence of both sends chills down the spines of our primary characters, but these chills aren’t the sort that cause one to feel a sense of concern in regard to the situation in question, at least not initially. At first, they are fresh, youthful, and verboten, which makes them all the more enticing to Pablo and Natalia. Though they remain that way throughout “Grass”, things begin to unravel, causing these chills to be of a much more alarming variety.
Social media doesn’t help matters. Photos of Pablo and Natalia with their personal paramours surface online, forcing both to face personal and professional consequences they both dreaded and knew to be possibilities, if not a given. Murga’s structure sees both narratives unfolding simultaneously, though Pablo and Natalia’s paths never cross. It’s not the most peculiar choice, nor the most effective due to how parallel the character’s arcs seem to be, nearly down to the words used in the comparative scenes both find themselves in. But a few distinguishable details make up for what might otherwise make “Grass” a relatively straightforward marital drama.
For instance, Natalia is the more reserved of the two when it comes to her connection with Gonzalo. Their relationship, like Pablo’s with Luciana, is eventually consummated, but it takes a little longer. Pablo and Luciana are far more cavalier in their affair, almost instantly falling into bed together, embarking on a passionate fling that sees them operate closer to a couple than the other romance ever gets. Additionally, Pablo’s wife, Carla, and Natalia’s husband, Hernán, respond very differently to the revelation of these affairs.
It’s these gender distinctions that fuel the film’s edge, a thread in its stitching that a lesser film might treat as minute, if not significant, while Murga renders them as intimately as the relationships she charts over the course of the film. Natalia seems to suffer more than her better half when her secret is unveiled, minimizing Gonzalo’s presence in her life to a “nothing” distinction, whereas Pablo is quick to note that he and Carla had been growing apart for some time, as though she deserves partial blame for his infidelity. Furriel and de Tavira (who delivers the stronger performance of the two, displaying the range that nabbed her the notice of the Academy for her aforementioned breakout role) make for excellent partners in a mirrored two-hander despite never meeting themselves.
This is precisely what makes “Grass” that much more curious a study: It’s not about their intersection, a plot point that, again, a lesser work would ensure to include as all but assured. One can imagine Murga inserting a scene where the two meet in the teacher’s lounge to share a moment of sympathy, even sorrow, but it’s much stronger work for eschewing the obvious. Instead, we see the two reckoning with their choices individually, working overtime to rekindle their matrimonies, something their corresponding deceits have indirectly done for them.
Should they face harsher fates than they ultimately do by the time Murga abruptly cuts to the credits? Do they get off scot-free, receiving slaps on the wrist rather than wraths charged by distrust and resentment? Perhaps that depends on your interpretation, not only of marriage but of lust. For as much as it can be malignant, lust is also often fleeting, while nuptials are meant to be eternal. There’s a reason “for better” and “for worse” are included in traditional wedding vows. The worst is inevitable; it’s how you move on from it, if you can, that matters.
