THE HEADLESS WOMAN : [4/10] : Lucrecia Martel : Arg 08 : 89m : {11/28}

As Alan Frank scathingly wrote about Tarkovsky’s Solaris, The Headless Woman sees writer-director Lucrecia Martel “mistaking obfuscation for art.” A desperately disappointing follow-up to 2001’s The Swamp (La ciénaga) and 2004’s The Holy Girl (La niña santa) – both of which suggested Martel was among South America’s most promising and accomplished film-makers – it’s the story of a middle-class woman who knocks over a dog with her car and suffers a minor head injury that produces an unsettling mental dislocation. As she drifts through her family and professional life, she’s increasingly tormented by suspicions that she might have actually killed a child rather than a dog. 
   And the audience is also tormented by suspicions that (a) our heroine may be experience some kind of posthumous Carnival of Souls type hallucination, and/or that (b) there’s precious little substance beneath Martel’s carefully-controlled atmosphere of enigmatic insinuation. By the end, the former seems to have been conclusively eliminated; the latter is more a matter of individual perception. 
    Hailed as a genuine masterpiece by many critics around the world after premiering in competition at Cannes 2008, The Headless Woman smacks of a film-maker who has paid far too much attention to the glowing reviews that greeted her earlier work, and who doesn’t know how to play to her strengths. Both The Swamp and The Holy Girl were essentially noisy, overcrowded ensemble pieces – The Headless Woman is much more of a character-study of a particular individual, albeit one who is evidently intended as indictment of a whole social class. Perhaps even a whole nation (it’s not too fanciful to read the whole thing as an allegory of how Argentinian society turned a blind eye to the “disappearance” of political undesirables during its not-so-long-ago spells of military dictatorship.) 
   But whereas Martel’s intentions are bold and intriguing, something has gone very wrong in terms of their execution: The Headless Woman is a classic example of slowness for slowness’s sake, filled with details of plot-development and character motivation that make sense only in terms of scriptwriting contrivance than anything connected with reality. As the distrait Vero, Marí­a Onetto copes well enough given the circumstances – trouble is, she’s given desperately little to go on. And so are we.

Neil Young
11th March, 2010

La mujer sin cabeza : Argentina/France/Italy/Spain
 ¦ The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, UK, 10.Mar.10 ( £6.00)  ¦ much better : La mujer sin piano (Woman Without Piano) by Javier Rebollo (Spain 2009)