Director/writer: Lucrecia Martel
Photography: Barbara Alvarez
Music: Roberta Ainstein
Editor: Miguel Schverdfinger
Cast: Maria Onetto, Claudia Cantero, Ines Efron, Cesar Bordon, Daniel Genoud, Guillermo Arengo, Maria Vaner
According to internet sources such as Google Translate, the original Spanish title for this movie, La mujer sin cabeza, does indeed appear to translate directly to “the headless woman,” although results suspiciously include links to information about showings of this movie, which made me think the phrase may be specifically idiomatic in some way. My very first thought was that it might be some kind of pun on the part of the translator for “the heedless woman,” as that is an obvious quality of the woman in question at the center of this picture, Vero (Maria Onetto). She is bourgeois, a professional dentist, middle-aged, well-coiffed, married with children and a lover, and appears to have a busy, somewhat empty social life. She appears to be numb, in short.
Early in the movie, on her way home from an elegant afternoon gathering, Vero’s cell phone rings in the car, she is momentarily distracted, and she runs over something. She sits in her car gathering herself, obviously shaken by the incident. But she never gets out of the car to investigate, does not really look at anything, not even in her rearview mirror. She only composes herself, taking deep breaths, and then drives on, jaw clenched basically for the rest of the movie. As she leaves the scene, we see the corpse of a dog on the road. But she has not seen it. And now, for the rest of the movie, she quietly falls apart in a self-controlled way that makes it very difficult to see she is falling apart at all, except for a worsening case of disaffection, which could simply be the modern condition, yes? She seems to me to be more exactly heedless than someone who has lost her head, momentarily or otherwise, because of a crisis. In her deeply controlled panic she is still rational enough to act as if the rules don’t apply to her if she can get away with it
According to internet sources such as Google Translate, the original Spanish title for this movie, La mujer sin cabeza, does indeed appear to translate directly to “the headless woman,” although results suspiciously include links to information about showings of this movie, which made me think the phrase may be specifically idiomatic in some way. My very first thought was that it might be some kind of pun on the part of the translator for “the heedless woman,” as that is an obvious quality of the woman in question at the center of this picture, Vero (Maria Onetto). She is bourgeois, a professional dentist, middle-aged, well-coiffed, married with children and a lover, and appears to have a busy, somewhat empty social life. She appears to be numb, in short.
Early in the movie, on her way home from an elegant afternoon gathering, Vero’s cell phone rings in the car, she is momentarily distracted, and she runs over something. She sits in her car gathering herself, obviously shaken by the incident. But she never gets out of the car to investigate, does not really look at anything, not even in her rearview mirror. She only composes herself, taking deep breaths, and then drives on, jaw clenched basically for the rest of the movie. As she leaves the scene, we see the corpse of a dog on the road. But she has not seen it. And now, for the rest of the movie, she quietly falls apart in a self-controlled way that makes it very difficult to see she is falling apart at all, except for a worsening case of disaffection, which could simply be the modern condition, yes? She seems to me to be more exactly heedless than someone who has lost her head, momentarily or otherwise, because of a crisis. In her deeply controlled panic she is still rational enough to act as if the rules don’t apply to her if she can get away with it
