The Headless Woman
Mirroring the current class struggle in Argentina, The Headless Woman is an elliptical psychological drama about guilt, personal responsibility, and self-deception. Searching for her ringing cell phone, affluent dentist Vero hits something in the road. Is it a dog? A person? She cannot bring herself to look at or report the incident. Part of writer-director Lucrecia Martel’s unique formal style is to follow character relationships that are established with fleeting lines of dialogue, to infer off-screen space through sound, and to question the limits of their own perception. Martel’s style proves particularly well-suited to a film built around a protagonist who’s suffering from something resembling amnesia. Like Vero, we are never quite certain who people are or how the images we see relate to everything we have seen before. As in her previous oblique but mesmerizing studies of family life in fetid, hothouse atmospheres, the aural frequently takes the place of the visual in dramatizing plot or creating a fully realized sense of place. Although none of Vero’s friends are particularly interested in her dilemma, when evidence emerges that she really may have killed something or someone, the men in her life move to protect her secret.
Sponsor:
Comcast
Cast & Crew
Director: Lucrecia Martel
Producer: Pedro Almodóvar, Augustin Almodóvar, Esther García, Veronica Cura, Enrique Pineyro, Lucrecia Martel,
Editor: Miguel Schverdfinger
Screenwriter: Lucrecia Martel
Cinematographer: Bárbara Álvarez
Awards: Rio de Janeiro International Film Festival 2008 (FIPRESCI Prize)
Principal Cast: María Onetto, Inés Efron, César Bordón, Claudia Cantero, Daniel Genoud, Guillermo Arengo, María Vaner
Filmography: The Holy Girl (2004); La Ciénaga (2001)
World Sales: Focus Features
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(2 reviews)
User reviews
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Beautifully Boring, Jun 01, 2009
By jdanielscott
“Lucretia Martel is excellent at setting, staging, and framing a scene in a highly artful, yet uncontrived, manner. What you don’t see is equally as important as what you do see. As a result her characters inhabit subtle, somber atmospheres in which time literally moves at a leisurely pace. Take”
… full review
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The Headless Woman, Jun 19, 2009
By tornadoZ
“The reviewer above does a nice job describing one of the moody, elegant scenes which, together with lots of similar others, make up Lucretia Martel's incredible film, The Headless Woman. It's true that it sometimes seems like not much is happening on the screen. But as we see Vero go about her”
… full review
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Also by this director
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Argentina, 2001, 103 min.
Lucrecia Martel’s 2001 debut film is a powerful document of a family being swallowed up by alcoholism, neglect, and all-around dysfunction. When the matriarch of a decaying bourgeois estate suffers an injury, she invites relatives to her crumbling country mansion, where tensions rise and old family wounds are reopened.
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Argentina, 2001, 103 min.
Lucrecia Martel’s 2001 debut film is a powerful document of a family being swallowed up by alcoholism, neglect, and all-around dysfunction. When the matriarch of a decaying bourgeois estate suffers an injury, she invites relatives to her crumbling country mansion, where tensions rise and old family wounds are reopened.
…
