Martel’s debut only got better with my second viewing of it. It is one of the most brilliantly disorienting films that I have ever seen, with every scene having something uncomfortable on display. But it is done subtly, and I only really notice the effect that the film had on me once it ends. But my reaction is immediate. It’s like I’ve been put under a spell, and when the credits fade in I snap out of it and everything that the film has done to me instantly takes its toll. Having now seen The Headless Woman (though only once) I still much prefer this one, but it is nice to know that she is still working toward similar goals: controlling and frustrating the audience at will, presenting circumstances that are almost mundane but are just off enough to hesitate and disrupt the film’s flow into and out off my consciousness, dazing me just as her characters are dazed.
I’ve developed a strange infatuation with the idea of Lucrecia Martel over the last three months. Before La Cienaga, I had not seen any of Martel’s three features. I had a vague interest in seeing her new film, The Headless Woman, when I was at the Cannes film festival last May, but a swift word-of-mouth of how awful it was turned me off and I decided to skip it. Fast forward a few months, and I get an issue of Film Comment that shows near unanimous praise for the film among the magazine’s 8-10 critics, many awarding it a 5 out of 5 stars. Then I read that Apichatpong Weerasethakul, who was on the jury at Cannes, considered it the best film in the Competition. Add to all of this the unfulfilled expectation of its inclusion in the Toronto Film Festival, and the missed opportunities and hidden proclamations of masterpiece status were enough for the film to explode in my head as some sort of misunderstood masterpiece, the best kind.
So I went out and bought Martel’s first two features, and put off watching either of them for one reason or another, and now I’ve finally gotten a chance to watch this one, her first film. If The Headless Woman is anything near the quality of La Cienaga, then Martel will be one of my favorite living filmmakers, because this film is spectacular. It somehow manages to tell an epic story about a woman who drunkenly falls and cuts up her chest on broken glass, and the family and friends who swarm around her as she recovers. Her life is never in danger, so in that way it is different than recent Desplechin films, but it has a similar vibe to his Kings and Queen and Un Conte de Noel.
There are all kinds of sexual tensions running through this film, and children carelessly shooting guns in a forest, always just about to shoot each others’ heads off, and a religious phenomenon that has the media in a frenzy. My head was spinning the entire time. Sometimes I had no idea what was going on, and I’m still unsure of many of the characters’ relations to one another. But the cumulative effect of the film is dazzling, hypnotic, paranoid, and somehow perfect.
Strange that I feel the same way about Martel. I fell in love with La Cienaga, was slightly disappointed with La Nina santa, and thought she’d gone off the deep end with La Mujer sin cabeza after I heard what the people at Cannes thought. Now it appears as if a lot of people are singing a different tune. Too bad the horrible word-of-mouth had to come at its premiere, because as far as I know, no US distributor has touched it.