Veró initially ponders the situation without investigating. It has only taken a few seconds for her world to come unhinged. As if to reinforce the point, a storm blows into the northwest Argentine outback that, in her earlier films La ciénaga (2001) and The Holy Girl (2004), Martel established as her own Yoknapatawpha County. Martel has been called a novelistic filmmaker—in her disinclination to spell out a narrative, she's a lot closer to Henry James than Charles Dickens. The story proceeds in casually hectic fits and starts; the plot is a patchwork of overheard dialogue and surprise cuts. How did Veró arrive at the clinic? Although not obviously injured, she breezes through a waiting room crammed with impassive Indians. Is she in shock or willed into a childlike state? Had she scheduled a tryst with a lover who may be married to her sister or cousin—or is it just one of those things? Dazed and forgetful, our protagonist wanders through her defamiliarized routines, engaging in all manners of impulsive behavior, dealing with servants and campesinos, always with a gracious smile and quizzical air. (Onetto's sustained brittle poise makes for an unsettling comic performance.)
As dense and fluid as Martel's movie is, the viewer—like the protagonist—is compelled to live in the moment. And a rich moment it is. With its shallow focus, chiaroscuro lighting, off-centered wide-screen compositions, and constant background noise, The Headless Woman teems with life. There's a jungle of family relations. Kids are always hanging around like ripe fruit although, like much else, Veró's precise connection to other characters has to be deduced. A key scene, with no apparent narrative function, has the elderly dragon known as Aunt Lala lying in bed disapprovingly fast-forwarding through a VHS tape and misidentifying the participants in a family wedding. At one point, she forgets that Veró has daughters—or maybe she confuses Veró with someone else (and Veró, still confused, seems to have forgotten as well).
The Film Society of Lincoln Center/IFC
Sullen teens, stormy skies
Details
I'm Gonna Explode
Written and directed by Gerardo Naranjo
IFC Films
August 12 through 18 Walter Reade Theater
The Headless Woman
Written and directed by Lucretia Martel
Strand Releasing
August 19 through September 1 Film Forum
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The Headless Woman demands an attentive spectator. In some ways, it's actually even more enigmatic after one grasps the premise, although then, Martel's argument is easier to follow. Her movie is less a psychological case study than an exercise in social pathology. Midway through, Veró tells her husband that she thinks she might have killed someone back on the road, the evening of the storm. (That someone, it would seem, is a poor Indian child.) Is she trying to confess, to remember, to understand? Even as the woman who has lost her head continues to act "strangely"—and strange becomes the new normal, or vice versa—class relations and privilege come to the fore.
Martel's movie has a gothic-sounding title and, had she been in the new wave business of dropping cine-references, she might have borrowed it from a 1947 Argentine potboiler Una mujer sin cabeza. (Instead, she says, it came to her in a dream.) The earlier tale of a "headless woman" is an old dark house comedy made to parody genre conventions. Martel's movie is more concerned with deranging cinematic conventions, but it, too, is set in a haunted house—a sardonic exposure of what a character in Godard's Weekend calls "the horror of the bourgeoisie."
