NYFF. The Headless Woman.

"The Headless Woman [site] is a scrupulously crafted, thematically sound social critique masquerading as a character study that, to put it bluntly, is so affected and emotionally inaccessible as to be borderline intolerable," writes Nick Schager.

"The film's opener - a series of glidingly crosscut images of children running and Verónica fussing with her girlfriends, capped by the haunting image of palm prints fading on a car window - is a tour de force of economical storytelling that makes the next 80 or so minutes moot," writes Manohla Dargis in the New York Times.

"I doubt I'll see a single more staggering movie, frame-by-frame, than The Headless Woman all year," writes Vadim Rizov at the House Next Door:

The camera is nailed-down and the maximalist widescreen compositions are astonishing in every direction—range of color, geometry (both horizontal and in depth), any trait you'd care to pick up on. Description is useless: this deserves large, glossy reproductions in Artforum or something. The function stays the same: people stare into mirrors that disorient you as to where others are coming from, glass doors get in the way, every visual is an exercise in ambiguity. And [Lucrecia ] Martel doesn't do formalist master shots: she cuts often enough that you're disoriented from one overwhelming frame to the next.

I hated every minute of it.

"There's no creeping sense of invisible miasma a la Todd Haynes's Safe, nor does the film peek into Inland Empire's terrifying abyss," writes Akiva Gottlieb in Slant. "Martel has a gift for conveying the tactility of unstable surroundings - the swamp of her La Cienaga exerts an unsettling metaphorical pull - and her protagonist's delicate unmooring never feels inorganic.... But at its core, is Headless Woman really about something as banal as middle-class domestic boredom, or the insularity of the bourgeoisie? Are we supposed to find the irony in Veronica's ability to serve her various roles without committing her thoughts and emotions? All we have are suggestions."

"Martel showed greater flair for depicting unexpected human behavior with The Holy Girl, which followed a religious teenage girl obsessed with a man who groped her on the street," writes Ed Champion. "But I suspect the absence of religion in The Headless Woman is one of the reasons why this film doesn’t quite work. Martel is a filmmaker who, like Pedro Almodóvar, cannot make a secular film that packs the same punch."

"Always on the verge of fragmenting completely, the film is held together by [Mária] Onetto's fascinating performance," finds Jürgen Fauth.

John Magary talks with Martel for the Reeler.

Online viewing tip. Kevin Lee has video of Almodóvar introducing the screening.

Earlier: Reviews from Cannes.

Updates, 10/10: "An unsettling sense of guilt and dread runs through this elliptical film that proves Martel has much improved from The Holy Girl, a less-than-meets-the-eye coming-of-age story containing only the intriguing potential of her medical-book approach toward depicting the human body." Michael Joshua Rowin for Stop Smiling: "The Headless Woman is her Red Desert, and a major step forward."

Chris Wisniewski interviews Martel for Reverse Shot.

"Martel further hones the visual economy and organic (yet meticulously structured), fractal narrative of her earlier films to create an Antonioniesque portrait of ennui and bourgeois dysfunction," writes Acquarello. "Moreover, Martel's recurring themes of classism and privilege are elegantly brought to the forefront in The Headless Woman, reflected explicitly in the disposability of a potter's missing errand boy (who becomes immediately replaceable when his younger brother takes over his job), and implicitly in an impoverished town's profound disconnection from the nearby, more affluent city."

The Headless Woman, "from an original screenplay by the director, marks 2008's first piece of unequivocally great filmmaking," argues Michael J Anderson. "Martel's decision to maintain excessively shallow depth of field in her wide screen compositions, many of which present Veró and Veró only in focus, serve to emphasize the cardinality of her psychology to the film's narrative - that is, it is purely Onetto's registration of the various shades of her character's anguish and discomposure that comprise the sharply-focused vectors of the mise-en-scène."

Updates, 10/11: "Simply one of the most confounding filmgoing experiences I've ever had, and as usual I'm uncertain how a 'normal' viewer - i.e., someone who hasn't made a point of entering the theater with no advance knowledge of any kind - would likely respond," writes Mike D'Angelo at FilmCatcher. "The whole thing is just... weird, in a way that's at once exciting and discomfiting."

Online listening tip. Evan Davis talks with Martel for the filmlinc blog.

Online viewing tip. FilmCatcher interviews Martel.

Update, 10/15: "Confused as I was for long stretches, unsure as I was about what it all added up to, I still found much to admire in the movie," writes Nelson Kim at Hammer to Nail. "Martel's mise-en-scène is a wonder to behold - note the endlessly inventive variations she plays upon the film's central visual idea of obscured vision: bodies with the heads out of frame, doorways that suggest exits to oblivion, fogged windows, mirrors reflecting a profound blankness in the characters' inner lives."

Update, 10/17: "In many ways, The Headless Woman brought to mind my favorite film from last year's New York Film Festival, Gus Van Sant's Paranoid Park," writes Jenny Jediny at Not Coming to a Theater Near You. "An accidental death is the obsession in both, and like Park, it matters little if you're aware of the impending loss prior to seeing the film; in fact, it may be better if you are. Martel doesn't navigate her way toward the death—she questions whether or not it actually happened: Did Verónica really hit a young boy with her car, or was it just the dog? What's remarkable is her reaction, or rather her lack of one, and where this leads her."

Posted by dwhudson at October 8, 2008 3:24 PM