"The Headless Woman" (continuará)

El estreno de la película se postergó hasta agosto. Con la mirada siempre centrada en el pequeño escándalo de cabotaje, algunos críticos --como me lo preveía-- ya están echándosele encima a "la calculadora" Lucrecia Martel y a "La mujer sin cabeza". Otros colegas sin tanta estrechez de miras, han empezado a hacer circular sus ideas respecto a la película, preferentemente en los Estados Unidos, donde se permiten mirar un poco más allá de los amiguismos y enemistades de turno. Sólo quería citar tres textos de colegas sobre "The Headless Woman", una película que con el tiempo la gente aprenderá a ver, sin que necesariamente eso desacredite al resto del muy buen cine argentino que se está haciendo este año...

The Cri de Coeur for the Best Film in Competition Least Likely to Win a Prize to Lucrecia Martel’s La Mujer Sin Cabeza (The Woman Without a Head)

A woman perhaps runs over a dog on the highway and, possibly as a result, suffers her own injury. Dazed and forgetful, she wanders through her newly defamiliarized routine, engaging in all manner of impulsive behavior, always with a gracious smile and quizzical air. For her third feature, the Argentine director of La Ciénaga and The Holy Girl has created a comedy of disassociation. La Mujer is typically dense (and often very funny) and, no less than the protagonist, the viewer is compelled to live in the moment. Is that a problem? This hilariously titled movie’s successful use of a genuinely experimental film language was rewarded with walk-outs, boos, and disastrous reviews.

J. Hoberman

Controversy at Cannes: The Headless Woman

“I feel a little ... I don’t feel good.” So says Veronica, the middle-aged upper-middle-class Argentinean woman who suffers a nasty bump on the noggin early on in Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman (La Mujer Sin Cabeza) and spends the rest of the movie in a semiconscious stupor, a stranger in her own body. Watching Martel’s film, which premiered midway through the 61st Cannes Film Festival, it occurred to me that Veronica’s woozy disorientation was a pretty apt metaphor for Cannes itself, where one can reliably emerge from seeing a near masterpiece only to discover that everyone — or at least the influential industry trade newspapers — has declared the very same movie une catastrophe! That was certainly the case with The Headless Woman, which was the first (though hardly the last) of this year’s competition entries to be greeted with lusty boos at the end of its press screening, putting it in such esteemed past Cannes company as Michelangelo Antonioni’s L’Avventura and David Cronenberg’s Crash. (In one of those rare alliances of Franco and Anglo sentiments, Martel’s film spent most of Cannes scraping bottom in the daily critics’ polls conducted by the British trade paper Screen International and its Gallic counterpart, Le Film Français.)

Martel’s movie — one of the strongest of a very strong festival — opens on a windy stretch of road, where Veronica runs over something with her car, bangs her head on the steering wheel, then drives on a bit farther before pulling over and staggering out into the first drops of a massive rainstorm. From there on, The Headless Woman exists in a concussive state, showing us the world through its protagonist’s highly unreliable eyes as she returns to her everyday routine, not quite sure of where she is or what she’s doing there, and beset by the nagging sensation that what she hit on the road may not have been canine after all. Like Martel’s first two features, La Ciénaga and The Holy Girl, this one is another merciless portrait of self-satisfied stagnation among the privileged elite; the movie’s running joke (admittedly a mordant one) is that Veronica’s family and friends keep assuring her that everything is perfectly fine, even as it becomes obvious that it most certainly is not.

Shooting for the first time in wide screen, Martel effects a sense of spatial and temporal dislocation that is close to the phantasmagoric subconsciousness of a David Lynch or Luis Buñuel. As she films her saucer-eyed, peroxide-blond leading lady (Maria Onetto) from a distance, in and out of focus, reflected in glass, we too begin to feel that we aren’t quite ourselves, that we are sharing in Veronica’s dark, private, waking dream. Most critics, though, were too busy complaining about being confused by the film to realize that this was exactly the point.

Scott Foundas

CANNES '08 NOTEBOOK Divided Reactions: "Headless Woman"

Lucrecia Martel's "The Headless Woman" also screened to a divided response; although in this writer's opinion, Martel's film is one of the competition's most mesmerizing entries.
If Martel's follow-up to "La Cienaga" and "The Holy Girl" drew a few boos after its world premiere, perhaps it was because expectations were too high or audiences weren't patient enough. After all, the Argentine filmmaker's first two movies were more unanimously appreciated, and by day eight in Cannes, critics were desperate for something easy on the eyes (maybe that explains the fawning over Clint Eastwood's "Changeling"). With "The Headless Woman," Martel narrows her focus, both narratively, in its concise examination of a single woman, and literally, with its frequent, evocative use of long lenses that isolate her protagonist from the blurred-out surroundings. Few filmmakers use focus as effectively and incisively as Martel.

With a curly head of dyed blonde hair, Vero (Maria Onetto) is that typical upper-middle-class Martel protagonist, whose privileged status is put to the test over the course of the story. The plot is set in motion when Vero, driving obliviously in her car, hits an object in the road. In the distance, it appears to be a dog. But Vero's post-traumatic shock suggests the accident is far more severe. In the days after the accident, Vero seems to barely remember who she is or what she does, smiling vacantly at those around her. Just as disturbing, friends and family don't really appear to take much note of her newly spaced-out behavior.

Inspired by Martel's dreams and nightmares, "The Headless Woman" is moody, mysterious and suffused with ominous portents and subtle critiques of the bourgeoisie. When Vero dyes her hair from blonde to a more natural brunette, we might expect this change to signal growing self-awareness or comeuppance. But, in fact, it's just one more cover-up (she admits her real hair color is gray by now) in a film about multiple cover-ups--and the elite's singular ability to block out the harshest realities, pretend they don't exist and live in vacuous ignorance.

Anthony Kaufman