Argentine director Lucrecia Martel's third feature The Headless Woman debuted in competition at Cannes last year. It played for the press in the Debussy Theatre toward the later stages of the festival, significantly the night after the marathon screening of Steven Soderbergh’s two-part, four and a half hour Che. The mood was more exhaustive and tense than festive, and the movie did not go well that night.
This was just the most recent example (the very next morning, Philippe Garrel's Frontier of Dawn also got the jeer of the crowd). I was instantly hooked by Martel's film, if a little discombobulated. It's a great film, I think, but a hard one to appreciate, much less fully understand, on a single viewing, especially toward the end of a long, endurance test festival like Cannes.
The movie's sales agent stuck a hard negotiating stance, which delayed its American theatrical release, but the good, serious folks at Strand kept with it, and finally came to terms and opened the movie theatrically last week at Film Forum. I certainly would have preferred to watch it projected, but that option was not available to write about it a judicious manner. (The movie is now set to play the other major markets throughout the fall.)
The forty-two-year-old Martel grew up in the northeastern flatlands called Salta. All three of her feature films are set in that region. (Her previous works are the stunning La ciénaga and the startling, quixotic The Holy Girl.) Martel has established a cachet on the international festival circuit, and Pedro Almodovar has produced the last two films.
Her talent deserves wider exposure; her case illustrates just how fragile is the state of Spanish-language cinema in gaining any kind of significant presence here, especially the serious and idiosyncratic vernacular she works in. The Holy Girl was one of the final releases of the oddly shaped HBO and Fine Line Features alliance and it never got the necessary jolt or resources to develop an audience here.
(Lucrecia Martel at the top; Maria Onetto as the title character. Photos courtesy of Strand Releasing.)
The movie's allusive title says alternately everything and nothing. The eponymous Verónica (Maria Onetto) is an attractive woman of means and social distinction (she's a dentist who operates a clinic with her brother) who quietly, methodically unravels following her slow realization that a small, minor act of nonchalance resulted in the accidental death of a boy.
Like her two previous works, Martel is a master of orchestrating social and familial networks; in her world, everything connects, especially the complex arrangements of sex, race and class. Driving alone in her car on a desert track of gravel and terrain that abuts a local canal, Veró turned her head to respond to a ringing cell phone and suddenly struck something, her head violently, spasmodically jarring forward. Dazed, Veró tries to gather herself and slowly drives from the scene, the long shot revealing what appears to be a dog lifelessly draped on the road.
As a retinue of men, her brother, a husband, her possible lover, react to her distress, Veró is increasingly unmoored by a precise, guilt-ridden sensation that a much graver personal and emotional loss occurred in the aftermath of the "accident." As such, Martel brilliantly, elliptically draws on Vero's trauma to explore the profound economic, political and cultural gulfs that isolate the country's different social divisions.
Veró's "shame," or "guilt," is not that she has lost her head but that her identity has been willed away, ostensibly wiped out. The widescreen cinematography is stunning, alert, quick, tactile; Martel and the cinematographer Bárbara Álvarez work in very shallow spaces, and they brilliantly use the horizontal space to break down and segment the action, finding consistently interesting visual patterns to evoke Veró's strained, fractured consciousness.
For the first forty or so minutes of the film, Veró is rarely seen head on; her portrait, point of view, her full advantage, if you will, is consistently altered or obstructed by physical objects (especially glass and panels). The mystery is not only uncovering what actually happened during the accident, but finding the means emotionally to reconcile the contradictory, confusing portraits offered up of Veró.
If part of the movie unfolds like a terrifying dream, without release or surrender, that's no doubt Martel's intention. The period details and decor are sometimes hard to fully understand. (Last year at Cannes, my friend Andrew O'Hehir of Salon did an interview with her, and she told him in clothes, hairstyles and the cars, she wanted to invoke the country's traumatic "dirty war," era when leftist political dissidents were rounded up and "disappeared").
(Onetto and Cesar Bordon. Image courtesy of Strand.)
Veró is part of her country's privileged political past, moving from the Peronistas to the ruling military juntas and beyond, where power, might and status are sufficient to erase from view the troublesome or unfortunate fates of others that sometimes stood in the way. The Headless Woman is a frightening example of how power works.
But it's not agitprop. The story is told in a rush of images conflated with the dynamic interaction of characters whose own confusing alliances, interests and shifting demands throw everything else off-kilter. I'm still not entirely sure of the complex family and sexual dynamics, like the young woman who's apparently in love with Veró ("Love letters are to be acknowledged or returned," she says) or the precise identity of the man whose assignation further complicates the plot.
Martel uses water imagery like Shakespeare. La ciénaga opens at a pool side gathering with ominous rain clouds perforating the background. The Holy Girl ends on a note of exquisite strangeness, using water as a cleansing for sexual experimentation in a closing shot of two girls swimming in a pool. In The Headless Woman, a tempest prefigures prominently in the developing story, a physical means to affix the chronology of events and a harsh reminder of how unforgiving evidence is washed away.
Rain is harbinger of doom. After the accident, Vero actually drives some distance before stopping the car and walking outside, presumably to both survey the damage and also take stock of her own emotional faculties. As she moves outside the car, the rain begins to pelt the windshield, leading to a remarkable cut, the black title card yielding to the most enthralling shot of the film. Vero is now being driven; she sits pensively on the passenger seat, her face and that of her Indian driver occupying the right side of the frame. The center of the shot are bursts of sunlight intermixed with the rain splashing off the window, as outside, a motorcyclist darts ahead of the car. ("The rain is going to be good for your hair," says a servant, as the scene cuts again to another location.)
Because Martel is not after the typical vengeance of making her protagonist suffer for her sins, The Headless Woman is not an easy film to admire emotionally. But make no mistake, it is the work of pure cinema: breathless, convincing, profound.
(The eerie palm prints are one of the movie's most unsettling images.)
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Posted by: HauhRhydaykah | 01/05/2014 at 11:07 PM