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| Courtesy of Strand Releasing |
Argentinian writer-director Lucrecia Martel is among the
most critically revered Spanish-language female film directors currently
working today. While only having
directed four features over the past twenty years, each film presents a
distinctly feminine perspective of life in Salta, Argentina and her works are
regarded as being at the forefront of the New Argentine Cinema wave despite
only starting in the 2000s. A precise perfectionist
whose time spent on the moving image seems almost fastidious, Martel’s small
but enriching body of work is an uncompromising study of contemporary female
life in Argentina who weave their way through the world mostly unaffected by social
norms that deliberately leaves audiences conflicted about what they’ve
ingested.
Her third feature and second installment of her loosely connected Salta trilogy of films interpreting female life from childhood to adulthood, The Headless Woman, is a uniquely feminine thriller and nonjudgmental character study of a wealthy Argentinean elite named Verónica (María Onetto) who upon driving home one day reaches down to pick up her cellular phone and strikes something off-camera with her car. Looking around the rear-view mirrors and side windows she sees nothing and drives the rest of the way home. Over time she becomes increasingly paranoid she may in fact have hit and killed a pedestrian and while seemingly fine on the outside, internally she’s burning up with anxiety and starts making mistakes. Returning to the scene of the “crime”, she notices a servant’s child being fished out of the canal by authorities right where her car struck something.
Though seemingly formless and slow paced, Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman is a quietly tense study of how an accident real or imagined can gradually transform a person from the inside out largely unnoticed. While Martel and cinematographer Bárbara Álvarez’s masterful panoramic camera remains trained on Verónica’s every move, nuance in expression and subtle shifts in physical appearance, those around her don’t pay the metamorphosis much mind. Observing the mundanities of her daily upscale lifestyle slowly coming apart piece by piece, we’re watching a woman tearing herself apart from the inside with just barely a glimpse of her personality changes visible to others. Much of it comes from María Onetto’s subtle performance which hides volumes of emotion behind her stoic eyes and chilly gaze.
While lacking an original score and seeming to play out in real time like a documentary, visually speaking this is an intensely controlled picture with precise framing and camera placement with equally razor-sharp key editing by Miguel Schverdfinger. One of the strengths of the film is how deftly director Martel weaves the threads of the distressed woman with narrowly evading a crime scene she may or may not have caused without ever feeling like a movie contrivance. In any other hands this kind of story would hinge upon phony twists and turns but here it feels authentic and immediate. Let it be said leading actress Onetto and director Martel form quite an actor-filmmaker team with Onetto being in nearly every scene with the camera never taking its eyes off of her. Almost intimate, we get deeply inside this woman’s headspace without the need for interior monologue or voice over narration, a testament to Lucrecia Martel’s directorial power.
Nominated for the prestigious Palme d’Or at the 2008 Cannes Film Festival and winner of the Best Film and Best Director awards at the Argentine Academy of Cinematography Arts and Sciences Awards, The Headless Woman despite being in limited theatrical release by Strand Releasing opened to almost unanimous critical acclaim. Regarded as one of the best films of the decade including but not limited to the BBC’s 100 greatest films and named the 24th greatest Argentinian film of all time, it helped further cement Martel’s status as one of the most formidable and wise female filmmakers in world cinema today. A subtle, quiet film that winds up achieving a kind of narrative cinematic and artistic breakthrough, The Headless Woman is one of the best character studies in recent memory that dives deep into its heroine’s headspace in a tale of how actions real or imagined can have a devastating impact on people whether they admit to it or not.
--Andrew Kotwicki
