Yesterday we waxed effusive about arthouse doyenne, Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel, who’s fabulously formalist picture, “The Headless Woman,” hits theaters this weekend in super-limited release (more below). We first saw the picture, her third feature-length effort, last October at the 2008 New York Film Festival, and were immediately bowled over by the strange rhythms, odd framing and spacial relationships.
Martel is essentially a master of sound and wide-scope framing, acutely understanding the psychology of the camera and how what you choose to show and not show to the viewer affects their state of mind. The mysterious picture is about a bourgeoisie housewife who gets into a random car accident on the fringes of her town where poor campesino children play. Did she run over a dog? Or is it one of the children who turn outs to be missing later on in the picture? We’re never quite sure and neither is she.
[there’s a tremendous shot where she eventually gets out of her parked car and aimlessly walks around outside as it rains. The camera, affixed inside the vehicle, holds a tight frame that she walks in and out of, signifying her discombobulated state]
In the accident, the housewife (superbly played by María Onetto with empathy, curiosity and elusiveness) injures her head and then slowly seems to lose herself, forgetting what she does or who those around her are. But, like a dizzying state of consciousness, she seems to drift in and out of different states of disassociation from her own persona. As TimeOut New York wonderfully puts it, the film is a “woozy, dizzy embodiment of middle-class callousness,” but at the same time is about more than simple class schisms (though Martel seems to have class structures on her mind in all her other pictures, “La Cienega” and “La Niña Santa”).
There’s also some incredibly subtle allusions to “Vertigo” as the disoriented protagonist goes from a stark blond to a chocolate brown half-way through the picture in her journey to retrace her steps and discover what exactly happened. “The Headless Woman,” is wonderfully disjointed and ambiguous in incredibly understated manners and Martel clearly knows how to carefully calibrate those special inches in cinema: a centimeter adjustment here in framing, a few frames early on a purposefully odd cut, or the sound of one scene colliding into the next.
It’s a terrific, yet dense picture about perception and cognizance that some have suggested bares resemblance to the tenors of Antonioni and Buñuel films (we feel those comparisons are slightly superficial, but fine, whatever). Obviously we can’t stop talking about it as it did really dazzle us, but we warn you, any dazzling from the picture is incredibly subtle and sometimes subconsciously disconcerting.
Here’s a great quote from the New York Times review:
A full appreciation of Lucrecia Martel’s elegant, rain-soaked film, “The Headless Woman,” requires the concentration and eye for detail of a forensic detective. Every frame of this brilliant, maddeningly enigmatic puzzle of a movie contains crucial information, much of it glimpsed on the periphery and sometimes passing so quickly you barely have time to blink.
That’s probably as much of a review as we’re going to get to this week, but we’ve written about the film several times now. Here’s the trailer if you haven’t seen it.
As we mentioned, the roll-out of the film will be really small. Catch it while you can:
New York, NY: August 19 through September 1 @ Film Forum
Irvine, CA: September 4 -10 University Town Center 6 – Regal Cinemas
Los Angeles, CA: September 10 @ Laemmle Theaters
San Francisco, CA: September18- 24 @ San Francisco Film Society
Nashville, TN: October 9 – 15 @ Belcourt Theater
Seattle, WA: October 23 – 29 @ Northwest Film Forum
