How I lost my head for The Headless Woman (The Guardian)

I adored this film; so have many others. But with UK distributors still reluctant to bite, you may have to travel to the Tate to see it

Peter Bradshaw

The Discovering Latin America Film Festival or DLAFF starts this Thursday in London, and there's a very particular reason for booking tickets. This festival is to showcase a remarkable film which when first shown at Cannes was variously jeered at for being a boring muddle, or hailed as compelling and inspired. Every time I think about it, I drift further into the latter category. Even if it isn't a work of genius, I'm inclined to say it's the work of a genius, or at the very least one of the most talented film-makers in the world.

The film is La Mujer Sin Cabeza, or The Headless Woman, by the 41-year-old Argentinian director Lucrecia Martel, and co-produced by the Almodóvar brothers: Pedro and Agustin. Depressingly, there is still no sign of an actual UK cinema release for this film. Distributors - perhaps perplexed like the rest of us by its enigma and formal difficulty - are backing away from it. Certainly, it doesn't offer the overt and more easily comprehensible sexiness of her earlier film, La Niña Santa, or The Holy Girl. (Her earlier film, La Cienaga, or The Swamp is set in a smiliar milieu to The Headless Woman. I was agnostic about that film, and yet The Headless Woman has made me want to revisit it.)

So far, the only chance to see this extraordinary movie in Britain seems to be at the DLAFF, which is scheduling a Martel retrospective and bringing the director over to give a talk after the screening at London's Tate Modern, introduced by the film writer Demetrios Matheou.

I would urge everyone to go, to hear Martel speak and see her film. Then they can post their views at, say, the bottom of this blog about what it means. Usually, a pretty clear critical consensus about the meaning of a film is rightly or wrongly reached fairly early on in its lifecycle, but, intriguingly, that consensus is still far from settled for The Headless Woman.

The film stars Maria Onetto as Verónica, a woman in what appears to be prosperous and glamorous early middle age. Driving along the highway one day, she has one hell of a bump. Has she hit something? Someone? She looks back through the windshield: nothing. Or, wait, was there something? In the days that follow, she goes into a state of denial. When she finally confesses to her husband that she might have killed someone, they return to the scene of the putative crime to find only a dead dog. But is that the end of the matter?

Verónica seems dazed and confused; the sheer impact of the car accident has jolted loose all the carefully buried secrets and problems in her life, and now they seem to be floating free, liable to be revealed. It's a mental condition for which Martel's cinematic style is perfectly tailored. Like Verónica, the movie itself appears mildly concussed — although it seemed that way before the crisis. The action is fractured and dislocated; the shots are framed in such a way that it often isn't clear what we are supposed to be looking at, what is important to the story and what isn't. Simply looking at what is unfolding on the screen is not easy: you find yourself looking at the top left, and then at the bottom right, and back again. The sound design also gives the curious impression that you are overhearing dialogue, rather than listening to it, in the conventional way. But what is happening?

This film's great champion and interpreter in the UK is Nick James, the editor of Sight And Sound, who after its premiere at Cannes gave all the rest of us journalists and critics the benefit of his inspired and articulate analysis. I have to say that almost single-handedly, he established among the English-language press the received wisdom about what it meant. I won't give this away here, but his line on the film was overwhelmingly persuasive. Others dissent. They say that doubt and confusion is the point. The movie could be that most feared and hated of things: an open text. A structural unfinish - to coin an inelegant phrase - could leave open points of access for the critical observer to enter and furnish his or her own explanation, or, perhaps, to exit, bewildered and annoyed.

I can hardly be sure of anything about The Headless Woman, but of one crucial thing I am certain - everything about it is intentional. Martel intended her film to look and feel and sound like that. The mystery is designed and crafted. It's not just an accidental fog. And it pays its audience the compliment of assuming that they intelligent people, that they are coming to the movie in the same receptive, open-minded spirit that they would read a demanding novel or visit a striking installation.

It is one of the films of the year; I hope some enterprising distributor in this country picks it up. But go and see it at the DLAFF anyway.