By Chlotrudis Independent Film Society
Rating: 4 cats
Director: Lucrecia Martel
Starring: César Bordón | Claudia Cantero | Daniel Genoud | Guillermo Arengo | Inés Efron | Maria Onetto
Original language title: La Mujer Sin Cabeza
Country: argentina, france, italy, spain
Year: 2010
Running time: 87
IMDB: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1221141/
Jeff says: “In the end, how you will have come through this movie will depend on what you saw in a brief shot towards the beginning of the picture. Vero, a successful dentist in a rural Argentine town, fumbles for her cell phone as she speeds down a lonely road. She hits something and stops. She spends a minute composing herself, looking everywhere but at what lies in the road behind her. She pulls away, and we catch a glimpse.
“If you choose to see, in that glimpse, the more drastic of the two possible outcomes, the movie may become for you, as it did for me, a straightforward, but very well done study of a woman coming unhinged for all the right reasons. For those who see the less drastic alternative, the movie may be more mysterious, as her reaction to the event may seem out of all proportion. They will be compelled to look at the details of her life to determine why, at this point, did this event serve to teeter her over the edge into madness? Neither Vero nor her husband can be bothered to travel to another city for their daughter’s wedding. Hepatitis runs rampant, infecting even the niece who has a crush on her. A boy goes missing. Storms buffet the town. Ancient fountains are found buried beneath the garden. Maybe those disturbances, intruding on Vero’s otherwise settled life, render her vulnerable.
“María Onetto distills the role of Vero into the essence of tragedy. She is almost always in the frame, but frequently away from its focus. You have to remind yourself to look at her. And yet, as randomly as you can remember to look, she is ever in character, fragile and steeped in pain, with distance, from her family and her daily routine, the only armor she can summon against looming insanity.
“The final sequence is devastating, employing a near-horror movie trope to portray her, finally, unmoored, adrift in a life she can no longer recognize. 4 cats”