I have seen Martel’s La Cienaga, which I think is incredible, but I have yet to watch her Nina Santa, which I am hoping to get to in the next few weeks. Based on La Cienaga and The Headless Woman, Lucrecia Martel is one of the more consistent filmmakers that I have recently encountered. Both films begin with an accident involving middle-aged women which spiral their family into an odd psychological trip with bizarre, incestuous sexual tensions. While La Cienaga feels broad and epic, The Headless Woman feels more intimate and specific to the mental state of one character: Vero, the aforementioned middle-aged woman.
One of the more interesting things in the film is that the viewer is shown, subtley but precisely, what happens in Vero’s car accident. We know what caused the accident, and in a last second glimpse of the roadkill as Vero drives away, we see what it is that she hit with her car, and we know that she didn’t look back to see what it was. From this point on, I was assuming that the film would take advantage of dramatic irony, as I watch to see the characters come to learn what it is that I already know. However, despite what I saw and what other characters continue to prove to Vero, she moves in the opposite direction, and believes that she has hit something far worse and more consequential than what I and the other character thinkt she hit. The great thing is that Martel moves right along with Vero, and I begin to question my own perspective. Did I see what I thought I saw? Is Martel showing things inaccurately to decieve me, and if so, how many other shots were inaccurate? This put me in a very unbalanced state of viewing, because, with the film becoming somewhat of a murder mystery, I cannot trust the characters, the filmmaker, nor myself to put all of the pieces together.
The cinematography is also remarkably deliberate. Throughout the first half of the film, I had trouble visualizing what Vero actually looks like because almost every shot of her (and there are many, she’s in almost every scene) has her either out of focus, in front of a bright light source which silhouettes her features, hidden behind another character or object, or, this one kind of funny Ha Ha, her head cut off by the top of the frame. One function of this is to have a distanced relationship with Vero, and it prolongs the amount of time that I spend studying her physical traits just to get to know her. But most importantly, especially as a psychological study of Vero, it keeps me distanced from what she is feeling. What also keeps me distanced from what is going on in her head is that she doesn’t really answer any questions about anything. Whether a character asks her about the accident or about something completely trivial to the plot, Vero often answers with blank stares or very brief responses.
All of this cumulates to a very frustrating viewing for a film, and I will have to watch it a second time before I can actually say that I enjoy it (will also have to do this because I was watching this in the dead of night and could barely keep my eyes open toward the end). It isn’t as instantly satisfying as La Cienaga is, but I wouldn’t be surprised if it has a huge load of hidden rewards that will impress me when I watch it again, which would have been the first thing I wanted to do when it ended if I wasn’t so damn tired.