The car accident she has in the film’s extraordinary opening minutes? This deftly executed sequence creates a fascinating haze around its heroine that never completely dissipates. Depending on the size of your screen (the one at the Museum of Fine Arts is more than adequate), it’s quite obvious what she hit. The Headless Woman is a parabolic drama that tells us something everybody knows but barely acknowledges: the rich get away with murder. ENTER CITY, STATE OR ZIP CODE GO. You could not be signed in. She’s a dentist, for instance, and the man who makes love to her not long after the accident is her cousin. After Vero pulls off, Martel cuts to an exterior shot that clarifies as much as she can bear to. Veronica moves slowly from a feeling of guilt to a sense that everything has been taken care of by the powerful men in her privileged life. It furthers the University's objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide, This PDF is available to Subscribers Only. Indeed, after Vero’s accident, which occurred while she was driving from the left side of the screen to the right, Martel often shows her facing or being driven the other way, which is to say: backward. Her willingness to forget loosely evokes the selective nature of the government’s institutional memory. A parabolic Argentine film about a woman who proves that the rich can get away with murder. With the car in the foreground, something is visible lying in the dusty road. But all the movie’s ambiguity depends on it. The question of the haircut isn’t a flippant crack but a key to the film’s enveloping obliqueness. The Headless Woman is a film appreciated more after analysis. But Martel doesn’t want to imply disorientation. Fortunately, this superb director remains headed in the opposite direction. If Hitchcock and Antonioni ever had an interest in class guilt, you’d have Martel. This is also the first of Martel’s films to build in a direction other than up. Vero (Maria Onetto) isn’t feeling herself lately. Copyright © 2006 - 2020 by CIStems, Inc., d.b.a. The filmmaker makes the most of little nuances which reveal the great gap between the rich and those who serve them in so many ways. What brought this on? The Headless Woman is a parabolic drama that tells us something everybody knows but barely acknowledges: the rich get away with murder. You realise the strangely profound effect it has had on you, yet you're not sure why. Most users should sign in with their email address. The condition of headlessness in Lucrecia Martel’s “The Headless Woman’’ is figurative. But all the movie’s ambiguity depends on it. Those themes have a … Sorry, we She drives to a hospital, dozes off in the waiting room, then wanders into a bathroom, where she seemingly attempts to position her head to stay within the camera’s framing. And so the movie becomes as much about our dislocation as it is about her protagonist’s. Search for other works by this author on: You do not currently have access to this article. Vero has dyed her hair a striking straw color. This article is also available for rental through DeepDyve. She drives away instead. (We see the back of her head as often as we do the front.) Driving home, alone, to her home in the Argentine province of Salta, Vero reaches for a ringing cellphone. However idiosyncratic they were, you miss the humidity and sexual heat of the other films. Vero pulls to a stop and tries to collect herself, replacing her sunglasses then resuming her drive, never so much as glancing in the rearview mirror for a look at what or whom she hit. Few nervous breakdowns are as stoically philosophical as Vero’s. She later confides in him that she thinks she may have killed someone. Veronica is X-rayed at the hospital, and her husband, Marcos (Cesar Bordon), notices that she is completely disoriented, almost in a daze. Meanwhile, Veronica (Maria Onetto), a wealthy middle-aged woman who runs a dental clinic with her brother, leaves a circle of friends at a gathering and heads down the highway alone in her car.