The headless woman

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Movie
German title The headless woman
Original title La mujer sin cabeza
Country of production France ,
Argentina ,
Italy
original language Spanish
Publishing year 2008
length 87 minutes
Rod
Director Lucrecia Martel
script Lucrecia Martel
production Agustín Almodóvar ,
Pedro Almodóvar ,
Verónica Cura ,
Lucrecia Martel,
Enrique Piñeyro
music Roberta Ainstein
camera Bárbara Álvarez
cut Miguel Schverdfinger
occupation

The headless woman (original title: La mujer sin cabeza ) is the third feature film by Lucrecia Martel and, with La Ciénaga - Morast (2001) and La niña santa - The holy girl (2004), belongs to the director's so-called Salta trilogy. It premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2008 and was nominated for the Palme d' Or. Before it started in Argentina on August 21 of the same year, it was shown at the Gijon and Locarno film festivals.

action

The film is set in Salta , a region of Argentina on the border with Bolivia . Verónica, known as Véro, a dentist around 50, is driving back from a family celebration. Carelessly, she runs over something on a deserted street that could have been an animal or a dark-skinned child. In the collision, her head hits the windshield. However, it simply drives on and can only be examined in the hospital afterwards. Before she gets her x-rays, she leaves the hospital. Later she sleeps in a hotel room with Juan Manuel, a relative of her husband. Back at home, Véro seems traumatized and cannot answer the simplest sentences. While she is absent and acts like a foreign body in her bourgeois everyday life, it is shown how the indigenous domestic workers go about their daily duties. A girl who helped out in the flower shop is missing.

Some time later, Véro tells her husband Marcos about the accident. He persuades Véro to return to the scene. She only finds a dead dog there and is relieved. In addition, Juan Manuel uses his good connections to the police. He finds out that nothing suspicious has been found near the scene of the accident.

A week later, Véro and family members passed the canal near which the accident took place. Construction workers are busy with a pipe that may have been blocked by a corpse. Passers-by close the car windows because of the stink of putrefaction and turn on the air conditioning.

At the end of the film, two of the three indigenous boys reappear, who in the prologue- like first scene of the film romping through a dried-out canal next to the street: They are now helping a gardener on Verónica's property to uncover a hidden well. They say that the third boy did not show up for work.

Eventually it turns out that the missing boy drowned and was not hit by a car. Véro attends another family celebration and is surrounded by her caring family. She discovers that her male relatives have removed all traces that they left on the day of the accident: for example, her brother picked up the X-rays from the hospital, and her husband repaired the dent in the car that was caused by the accident. There is no longer a booking for the hotel room in which she stayed on the day of the accident. She herself dyed her bleached hair dark brown and has thus returned to her natural hair color.

background

The Headless Woman was co-produced by Pedro Almodóvar's production company El Deseo. In Argentina, the film was not shown in theaters for much longer than a week, but it was highly regarded at international festivals and by film critics.

It is Martel's first feature film that is not about growing up. According to the director, the camera perspective should make the film appear as if it were running in Véro's head. One of the themes of The Headless Woman is the refusal of the Argentine population to acknowledge the growing economic inequality between the middle and lower classes.

reception

The film was voted one of the 100 best films of the 21st century by the BBC . Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian places him in a row with Vera Drake from Mike Leigh and Caché from Michael Haneke : In all three films shot in the noughties , the themes of guilt , denial and the return of the repressed are negotiated.

Cristina Nord mentioned in Standard Martels “an elegant, unobtrusive way of registering social upheavals using the means of the cinema”. The provincial narrowness and the bigotry of the residents of Salta are illustrated by the interplay of "confusing images and a soundtrack that causes discomfort with background noises". The montage increases the impression of confusion, and at the end of the film the fragments do not come together to form a coherent whole. On the other hand, the arrogance of the middle class towards the indigenous employees is clearly shown.

Stephen Holden compared the film in the New York Times to Playing With Love by Antonioni . The conscious forgetting of an event and the secret consent to suppress a memory are also described here. Similar to Blow Up , a metaphysical haunted story is told, with a crime that may never have taken place. Vero's behavior is subtly associated with the Argentines' silence during the military dictatorship .

Bev Zalcock stated in her essay "Judgment and the Dissapeared Subject" that what u. a. Lucrecia Martel, who represented “New Argentine Cinema”, tried to establish a connection between the problems of the present and the time of the military dictatorship. Key elements in understanding The Headless Woman are dictatorship, Desaparecidos and the silence that surrounds both. María Onneto's introverted acting expresses Vero's ambivalence and powerlessness and contributes to the enigmatic aura of the film. The camera work often creates the impression in the audience that they cannot see what is happening and that they are powerless. By frequently doing without connections when editing , Martel undermines the prevailing narrative strategies and normally creates space for the invisible and the inexpressible.

Awards (selection)

  • Nomination for the Palme d'Or at the Cannes Film Festival (2008)
  • ICP Award Winner in the IndieWire Critics' Poll for Best Non-Distributed Film (2008)
  • Village Voice Film Poll Winner for Best Not For Sale Film (2008)
  • Winner of the Critics' Award at the Latin American Film Festival in Lima (2008)
  • Award of the Academia de las Artes y Ciencias Cinematográficas de la Argentina to Lucrecia Martel as best director, for the best film and the best original screenplay (2008)
  • Cóndor de Plata to María Onetto for Best Actress at the Award of the Association of Argentine Film Critics and Film Journalists (2009)
  • Award for best female director at the Latin ACE Awards in New York (2010)
  • FIPRESCI award for the best female director at the Festival do Rio (2008)

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Films by Lucrecia Martel. In: Trigon-Film. Retrieved July 4, 2020 .
  2. ^ Fiona Clancy: Motherhood in crisis in Lucrecia Martel's Salta trilogy . In: Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media . No. 10 , 2015, ISSN  2009-4078 , p. 1-12 ( ucc.ie ).
  3. ↑ a b La mujer sin cabeza. In: IMDb. Retrieved July 4, 2020 .
  4. ↑ a b Gijón: Headless Woman leads Argentinean-European contingent. In: Cineuropa. November 25, 2008, accessed July 5, 2020 .
  5. ↑ a b Cristina Nord: The shock and the unrest. In: derStandard.at. October 24, 2008, accessed July 4, 2020 .
  6. ↑ Stephen Holden: What It Hurts to Remember Becomes Convenient to Forget. In: The New York Times. August 18, 2009, accessed July 11, 2020 .
  7. ^ A b Peter Bradshaw: The Headless Woman. In: The Guardian. February 18, 2010, accessed July 6, 2020 .
  8. ↑ Katja Nicodemus: The madness, the heat, the morass. In: Zeit Online. July 18, 2018, accessed July 6, 2020 .
  9. ↑ La Mujer sin Cabeza - The woman without a head. In: daskino.at. Salzburg Film Culture Center, accessed on July 6, 2020 .
  10. ↑ Leslie Felperin: The Headless Woman. In: Variety. May 21, 2008, accessed July 5, 2020 .
  11. ^ Georg Seeßlen: Film knowledge: Thriller: Basics of popular film . Schüren Verlag, 2013, ISBN 978-3-89472-706-2 .
  12. ↑ Matt Losada: Lucrecia Martel's “La mujer sin cabeza”: Cinematic free indirect discourse, noise-scape and the distraction of the middle class . In: Romance Notes . tape 50 , no. 3 , 2010, p. 307-313 , JSTOR : 43803153 .
  13. ↑ a b c Stephen Holden: What It Hurts to Remember Becomes Convenient to Forget. In: The New York Times. October 2, 2008, accessed July 7, 2020 .
  14. ↑ a b Bev Zalcock: Judgment and the dissapeared subject in "The Headless Woman" . In: Silke Panse, Dennis Rothermel (Eds.): A Critique Of Judgment in Film and Television . Palgrave Macmillan, New York 2014, ISBN 978-1-137-01417-7 , pp. 234-254 .
  15. ↑ Matt Losada: La mujer sin cabeza by Lucrecia Martel . In: Chasqui: revista de literatura latinoamericana . tape 39 , no. 1 , May 2010, p. 214-215 , JSTOR : 27822281 .
  16. ↑ Haden Guest and Phillip Penix-Tadsen: Lucrecia Martel . In: Bomb . No. 106 . New Art Publications, 2009, pp. 30-37 .