Lucrecia Martel’s oblique thriller (or “thriller”?) has made many critics swoon–not just end-of-year lists but leaping into decade round-ups, too. I kinda agree…. ‘though it is the kind of knotty, imagistic film that pushes against the viewers’ (or this one’s) desire for narrative even as Maria Onetto’s brilliant performance as the bourgeois Vero Lala suggests deep wells of story that keep sucking us back in.
The pitch? A well-to-do Argentinean matron may, or may not, have run over–and then raced away from–a child. Maybe it was a dog. We are there when it happens, but–for the first half of the film, in particular–we’re always kept off-kilter with events. Cut to her in a hospital clinic, a hotel, at home; we keep getting newly-situated, and then trying to figure out what’s going on. And, even more, who she is. She’s not a blank, but Onetta’s performance is like a gorgeous opaque facade–flashes run across her dewy eyes, fear or fierceness ripple in the tightening of her lips. We constantly seek out her face, the possible foundation for our ability to make sense of what’s happened and what it means. Yet (see title) Martel continually cuts off even that view — just after the collision, the car on the side of the road, Vero paces outside in the rain, but the camera stays in the car, and we see only her torso; later, at the hospital, the x-ray machine comes down in neatly to occlude our view of just her face. It’s almost as if all the basic connective tissue of exposition is boiled away, the film reduced to its densest, most evocative portrayal of character. Instead of pinning Vero into a plot, we are stuck trying to reverse-engineer: who she is, how she behaves, will tell you what kind of story it is… and so the suspense, the mysterious compulsion of the film, is trying to read Vero.
J. Hoberman compares the film to Antonioni (okay) and Henry James, both of whom I appreciate more than love, but this film really hooked me. It’s slow and mesmerizing. The film evokes–and I’ll steal from Hoberman here–the deep social pathologies of class. It’s good. I need to see Martel’s other stuff.
I don’t disagree with anything above, short the fact that The Headless Woman didn’t “hook me.” If I’m to read it as allegory (circling around issues of class and privilege), then it all seemed rather cut and dry (I felt as if I got the “message” long before the last shot). I did appreciate Onetta’s opaque performance, but, well, I needed a bit more narrative meat on the bone.