La mujer sin cabeza (2008) Reviews

• Magnificent and audacious

  howard.schumann2009-10-04

  Argentine politics from the 1970s and class differences of today play an important role in Lucrecia Martel's third film, The Headless Woman, the story of a middle-aged woman refusing to confront the truth about a hit and run accident. Shown at the Vancouver Film Festival, The Headless Woman, like Martel's earlier works, defies conventional cinematic language and can be challenging to appreciate on first viewing. Characters come and go, seemingly unrelated incidents pile up, and we hardly know who is who, but little of that ultimately matters. What is more important is that Martel has taken us effortlessly into the head of the main character as persuasively as any film in recent memory and has turned one woman's failings into a clear and simple statement of her own vision. The Headless Woman opens on a rural road in Salta Province in northwest Argentina where four young boys and their dog are engaged in risky play along the highway as a car approaches. The atmosphere is one that portends danger. Meanwhile, a group of friends prepare to leave a gathering. Children are being shepherded in and out of cars while one mother, Josefina (Claudia Cantero) models her eyelashes in the car window. One woman (Maria Onetto) stands out because of the bleached blond color of her flowing hair that comes down to her shoulders The woman, Veronica (called Vero by her acquaintances), runs a dental clinic with her brother but we know nothing else about her life, past or present. While driving home by herself, she hears the ring of her cell phone and is momentarily distracted from the road. Suddenly she feels a thud and her head is thrust backward, then forward onto the dash. Whether or not she has hit something, a dog or a person, is unclear because the woman is frozen into inaction for what seems to be an eternity. She stops the car but is unable or unwilling to step outside to see what happened. She thinks she sees a dog in the rear view mirror but does not turn around to get a closer look. Eventually she gets out of the car but simply stands there while the first drops of a heavy storm pound the windshield and we can see mysterious fingerprints on the side window. Soon she drives off to be x-rayed at the local hospital while the radio plays Nana Mouskouri's "Soleil Soleil", a song that was popular in the seventies. She appears dazed and barely recognizes the people around her but continues smiling incessantly. Her husband Marcos (Cesar Bordon) notices her disorientation but learns nothing about that night until much later when she tells him that she may have killed someone. Juan Manuel (Daniel Genoud), her husband's cousin and occasional lover, calls the police and tells her there were no reports of an accident on that night but one week later, a boy's body is retrieved from the canal with no indication of a cause of death. The boy was one of the children who worked for her gardener. Immediately her friends cover all traces of her possible involvement in what could be a potential crime. X-rays disappear as well as records of her hotel room tryst with Juan Manuel. Similarly, her car is repaired with all traces of the accident removed. The Headless Woman is grounded in Vero's inability to focus on the reality of the life happening all around her. She is a detached observer rather than a participant, operating in a world of privilege where her every need is met by her extended family or by dark-skinned servants and boys begging to give a car wash for something to eat. In that milieu, Vero can easily avoid taking responsibility for her actions whether it be cheating on her husband or failing to investigate a car accident. Like the pampered middle class of her country, she is deaf to the suffering around her, and her decision to forget may be a metaphor for the collective amnesia of her country of the torture and murder of thousands during the dictatorship of the seventies. Martel has stated that her aesthetic decision to link the 70s with the current time is a statement calling attention to the fact that the blindness of the past continues to the present day in the growing disparity between rich and poor. That she has shaken us and provoked us to look at unpleasant facts about her characters, the world, and perhaps even about ourselves is a hint as to why her magnificent and audacious film was booed at the Cannes Film Festival.

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• You are the detective

  diegorosd2014-05-04

  The reproof that you never quite know what Vero hit on the road simply means that you're not paying enough attention. The movie does a great job of suggesting what happened, from the time we see the child's hand print on the window, immediately following the accident, until the very end. Each frame of the film becomes subject for investigation...a space for the director to bury her clues. One simply has to play the part of the detective. You'll see that there is a perfectly straightforward explanation to everything that happens in this film and the incident is eventually wrapped up rather neatly by the end. This is my abridged version...Vero hits both a dog and a boy on the road. The dog lays dead on the road while the boy falls to the (then) dry canal. Five minutes after the accident it starts to rain. It rains all weekend and the canal fills up with water. The body of the boy has begun to move, drifting away with the current of the canal. This is why when Vero tells her husband that she killed someone on the road and they go back to look for the body, they only find the dead dog. Also, she is informed that there have been no reports of an accident on that road. Vero seems to be getting over the incident and to believe that she may have been mistaken after all. "It was nothing…" she tells her nephew's friend. When they go buy the pots for the plants for the first time, however, things begin to change. First, the man who sells the pots tells Vero that there is a boy who hasn't been coming to work. And then, on the drive back they see the firemen trying to get something out of the canal - it is the boy's body that Vero hit on the road. Vero's husband, cousin and brother get together and cover the whole thing up, destroying all evidence - getting the car repaired, removing documents from the hospital and the hotel. The newspapers say the boy drowned…Vero knows otherwise but you can see how she tries to convince herself of the lie over and over again. This is a film about ghosts - and the madness of blocking out the truth and placing a lie in its place. The water and the canal act as a beautiful metaphor for the way that our mind moves undesirable truths to the back of the head and tries to keep them there from surfacing. Vero seems to finally find a way to cope with the incident by changing her hair color, as though she could find some vindication in bringing her look a notch closer to the native population. "I did it myself" she tells her cousin's wife. "Oh, you're brave!" she responds. Both women react to the subtext - Vero is a coward and everyone knows about what happened. Yet everyone is willing to keep it under the surface, unspoken, and in their passivity the entire clan has become her accomplice. When Vero goes through the crystal doors in the end and into the room where they're holding a party, she seems to be walking into a space suspended from ordinary reality, with its own set of rules and alliances. The disappearance of bodies and their cover-up is a very preponderant aspect of Argentine history and here plays itself out through a more banal situation. Yet what's really fruitful in Martel's conceit is that by placing her main character in a state of complete disorientation, we perceive the strangeness of her quotidian reality along with her. Suddenly, small, insignificant, daily exchanges between different class members come to the fore with all their anachronism, strangeness and violence.

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• A map in this woman's head.

  ser_insociable2008-09-21

  Vero (Maria Onetto) has run over something while traveling back home, but she's totally scared and shocked to stop and watch (was it a boy or a dog?). Instead, she just goes on... from that moment,for Vero its time to try to forget. Blames, ghosts, fears and uncertainties turn the third Lucrecia Martel's film into a masterpiece which will divide even to her fans. There are many feelings around the story and no one is completely shown or expressed. The clues to find out what Vero run over slowly appear but don't expect to understand clearly what happened, and neither understand what is she thinking nor feeling. Her head seems having stayed on the road where she had the accident and now is everything is dark and confused. Lucrecia Martel's camera shoots the story in a society where the social differences are clear, but their characters are not aware of it. The performances are quite good. Maria Onetto is so expressive! all of them are really involved with the film. Even Inés Efrón is good! - because I still cant understand why critics said she was excellent in 'XXY'. As I said, 'The headless woman' is not for everyone, ''it is confused ,too experimental and not totally resolved'' some wrote. But trust me, it's intelligent, different and sensitive. It is a road to nowhere, it is a map without any road. Because she has lost her head in that accident and as a viewer you just follow the road you may feel is the right to understand Vero and the story. Thanks Lucrecia!... again. 10/10

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• Personal guilt and class malaise

  Chris Knipp2008-09-18

  The Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, whose multiple-voice films 'The Swamp' and 'The Holy Child' won her an international following, turns to the interior psychology of a single woman with this new feature. Whether she succeeds as well with this new one, 'The Headless Woman'/'La mujer sin cabeza,' is an immediate question given predominantly negative reviews at this year's Cannes Festival, where it was booed at a press screening. The critics nonetheless acknowledged the film's stylistic elegance; Salon's O'Hehir, an American defender, wrote, "no one could argue that it's incompetent or implausible, or that it lacks thematic and artistic coherence." He insisted "people just didn't get what Martel was driving at, and that clearly bothered them." Of course it would, because despite the director's thinking this her clearest film, it has communication problems—which do not detract from its interest, however—and material for debate: what Martel sees as a study of class, Variety describes as "a psychological thriller." It's hard for viewers to see eye to eye, which is fine, but what's less fortunate is the failure to engage of the low-keyed film. The Headless Woman begins by showing a group of urchins playing riskily by a road adjoining a canal. Later a huge rainstorm comes that causes cars to be disabled and its effect becomes important later. Along comes Veronica (the excellent, well cast Maria Onetto), a well-off dentist in a nice car driving at high speed, and she hits something big, but instead of investigating she stops, obviously shaken, and drives on to town to a hospital where she's scheduled for an X-ray. She later has a sex date with Juan Manuel (Daniel Genoud) at a hotel, but she acts dazed and disconnected, evidently deeply shaken ever since whatever happened on the road. This like Martel's previous works (especially 'The Swamp') has a whole network of people and relationships, this time a little more vague because seen through Vero's confused eyes. She leaves things and people hanging, often not even speaking and appearing to have lost her reason. Her husband Marcos (Cesar Bordon), also a dentist, offers to take on her most serious cases. She runs errands involving plants and jars for a patio. A gardener digs in the patio and finds remnants of a pool. Women friends gossip about a new swimming pool someone they know has built near a veterinary hospital and in one scene they're all there, gossiping even more. Various friends and family members live nearby and come and go, or meet at the new pool. Juan Manuel is married to Josefina (Claudia Cantero), who is sister or cousin, perhaps, and Josefina is the mother of a plain teenager with hepatitis, Candita (Ines Efron) who has lesbian longings for Veronica. The latter has two daughters with Marcos who flit by briefly. The point may be that to Veronica none of these people really quite matter, but in the small-town Argentinian environment of these well-off people, there's no escaping them. Finally Veronica declares to her husband and a relative that she killed someone on the road, a boy. They hasten to clear this up and say she's just imagined it. They drive to the road and find only a dead dog—seen from Veronica's car earlier--the camera never shows a person on the road. From now on Veronica is coherent and sure of herself again. Her hair was bleach blond, and she now dyes it black. A statement by the director reveals she has herself occasionally had nightmares in which she fears she has killed someone; one involved a corpse whose severed head she tried to hide. She has also commented on the growing gap between rich and poor in Argentina in recent decades. A suggested subtext here is of upper class guilt, a crime against the poor that cannot be forgiven but is also never fully acknowledged. Veronica and her family are constantly shown being cared for and ministered to by servants and employees or simply poor people who pass by looking for work, to cart things back and forth or wash an SUV—people who, however, don't emerge as distinctive characters. Martel's films are good at conveying everyday confusion, families always partly in motion and partly still, lost souls. Her scenes have the specificity of random elements; they don't seem deterministic or over-calculated. She has a distinctive way of framing interiors with unconventional camera placements, and a fine sense of color. The acting here is uniformly good. There is a sense of terrible moral confusion and an anomie almost worthy of Antonioni, a mood only heightened by all the bustling about of people around the distraught and distracted central character, who seems uniquely present for being so detached. But Antonioni has been done, and though it's no crime that the thriller element fizzles, the film, despite its elegant texture, finds no clear note to end on. Finally it turns out there was a body found in the canal, but it's never clear exactly what Veronica actually hit. Included in the NY Film Festival at Lincoln Center, October 2008.

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• You know you want to endure me.

  peter-jacobson-12009-08-21

  I'm really puzzled by the enthusiasm for this film. Like, what are some of you really seeing in this? I defy you to see this movie again. Seems like it went over best with American film buffs who want to prove they 'get' foreign film and can sit through anything or men who just like a blonde heroines. I liked 2 shots of the motorbikes alongside car windows and perspectives splitting the door and inside of the woman's home. But if you were in this for THAT then watch 10 minutes of Douglas Sirk instead. I am no stranger to South American literature and film but I found this painful and only barely intriguing. I like to think I'm reasonably intelligent. I watched every frame of this thing but I mean damn. So the goal here is make characters bland/uninteresting as possible, put them in barely memorable interactions/situations, no music to speak of, uninteresting exteriors and interiors...and then I'm supposed to be super-gripped that one of the boys didn't come in to work! Of course! Toe on the line of 'who cares'. Like why are we supposed to care about this woman? Her non-reactions are kinda interesting but there's barely an emotional connection to be had through a lot of this. Tell me I'm wrong. I didn't appreciate my 70s style art film punishment properly! The rewards of understand/recognition are so slight here. You really look for these values in your high art? So you're absolutely sure this isn't in any way ..lazy? You really found this powerfully conceptual? This is from a whole swath of avant garde film/music/art that prides itself on, gee I don't know, hating the audience. It's contemptuous. Super tedious and played out and adolescent. The last scene where you see the woman at the gathering in among the other guests and obscured from a distance. The filmmaker is literally denying the audience access to the scene at hand. It's a perfect summation of the forced removal of this film. Obnoxious. Holden's Times review is ridiculous. 'rain soaked'. Hardly. Two maybe three scenes with rain? "Maddeningly enigmatic puzzle" or just maddening? Just because something is super conceptual doesn't necessarily make it impactful or particularly meaningful. I liked some of the ideas in here about Argentina's history and indifference and bourgeois boredom but this was a bit too obtuse for me. So am I glad that I gleaned some meaning out of this? Only maybe. Holden's doing A LOT of explaining here. This movie is kind of like art that's pleased with itself to do almost nothing for the eye and comes accompanied by a huge and detailed textual explanation/defense. Kinda yawn.

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