Slideshow
THE HEADLESS WOMAN
Wednesday, June 26
6:20
Introduced by Carlos Gutiérrez, Co-founder & Executive Director of Cinema Tropical
Argentina, 2008
Written & Directed by Lucrecia Martel
In Spanish with English Subtitles
Approx. 87 min. DCP.
From the director of LA CIENAGA, comes this oblique, compelling tale of a poster child for the South American haute bourgeoisie: blonde and bland, perfectly coiffed and made-up, usually sitting behind the wheel of a Mercedes. María Onetto plays a woman whose perfect life may be a dream or whose nightmare accident (was that a child her car hit? a dog? or nothing?) may indicate that her entire existence lacks reality. Critics have referenced David Lynch and Luis Buñuel as forerunners for the kind of hyper-reality the film exudes. When the film played at the 2008 New York Film Festival, the Village Voice’s J. Hoberman wrote: “The third feature by Lucrecia Martel, leading director of the Argentine renaissance, is her strongest to date — at the very least, this brilliantly edited, purposefully disorienting comedy about a middle-aged woman’s post-car-accident confusion is the movie I’m most looking forward to revisiting.”
Programmed by Tristan Pollack for Young Film Forum (YFF), a program for members in their 20s and 30s. Learn more about YFF here.
This screening is open to the general public.
For YFF-eligible patrons, please email jesse@filmforum.org to RSVP for a post-screening soirée at our nearby programming offices.
Supported by The Robert E. Appel Fund for Spanish and Portuguese Language Films
STRAND RELEASING
Reviews
“In what could be one of the greatest films ever made about the emotional realities of a damaged mind, this giddily disorientating latest from Lucrecia Martel is a work of frenzied genius.”
– David Jenkins, Time Out
“NOTHING SHORT OF A MASTERPIECE. A masterly, disturbing and deeply mysterious film about someone who strenuously conceals from herself the knowledge of her own guilt. Each time I have seen it, this film has swirled residually in my subconscious for days, and each time I have witnessed exactly the same spectacle outside the cinema afterwards: knots of people excitably, grumpily arguing about it…This is not an easy film to watch, or to understand, but the potency with which it resonates in the imagination is remarkable.”
– Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
“Every frame of this brilliant, maddeningly enigmatic puzzle of a movie contains crucial information, much of it glimpsed on the periphery and sometimes passing so quickly you barely have time to blink… In interviews Ms. Martel has suggested that THE HEADLESS WOMAN is about Argentina’s refusal to acknowledge a widening economic disparity between the middle and lower class… [The film is] is a metaphysical ghost story in which enigmatic clues are dropped about a possible crime that is never solved. The more closely you study THE HEADLESS WOMAN, the deeper and more unsettling are its mysteries.”
– Stephen Holden, The New York Times
“One of the great films of the decade…Trance film, ghost story, and political allegory, the impossibly dense and allusive HEADLESS WOMAN inlays every image with enigma so that its simple tale of a woman seized by the belief that she has committed a crime takes on an air of epistemological riddle.”
– James Quandt, Artforum
