Directed by Lucrecia Martel
At Film Forum through Sept. 1
Runtime: 87 min.
The Headless Woman does not resurrect Gwyneth Paltrow's character from David Fincher's Se7en, but its heroine, Vero (Maria Onetto), a Buenos Aires dentist, suffers a metaphorically similar dire condition after a car accident. The bang-up intensifies Vero's daily bewilderment: A married woman, Vero's also a casual adulteress—neither man really appreciates her worth. Vero's quasi-consciousness about the privileges of her bored bourgeois life is director Lucrecia Martel's big revelation.
Martel is a very minor art-filmmaker. Not especially insightful, she exemplifies the second-rate aesthetics of underdeveloped cultures. Her over-subtle approach hides the superficiality of her dull, dull style. That makes her a heroine to the lo-fi, mumblecore crowd who reject more expert, pointed filmmaking; just as Martel seems ignorant of Fellini's Juliet of the Spirits, Cassavetes' A Woman Under the Influence or Paul Mazursky's An Unmarried Woman. In fact, Onetto's dazed Vero strongly resembles the latter film's Jill Clayburgh whose Erica also had an arrogant far-away look—and the haughtiness of feminist deliberation. Martel's lollygagging approach to Vero's inarticulate feminine malaise is worse than self-indulgence; it gratifies a clueless audience's indulgence.
I could only laugh at the media's praise for Martel's "exacting formalism and beauty." That means she wastes widescreen compositions, frequently cutting off Vero's head or obscuring her face. Meandering through Vero's confusion/indifference about whether she accidentally ran over a child or a dog, Martel concentrates on the edges of the frame. Not what's outside it, but the mystery at protagonist's periphery. Negative space is not filmmaking-especially when it translates into what is actually class- and feminist-unconsciousness. Vero's friends make dull chick-talk about hair color, supposedly to convey their political naivete.
Martel has wan instincts and second-hand insights (the auto-crash mystery was richer in Julian Fellowes' Separate Lies and the Losey-Pinter Accident). Vero encounters nothing as sharply revealing as "Diet," that great 1982 single by postpunk band The Au Pairs that exorcized the self-denial in average female domestic habits. Martel demonstrates how far pop culture has receded from Fellini, Cassavetes, Mazursky, Fellowes, Losey and Pinter.
