21/05/2008

Two young kids and a dog are playing in a dry ditch by the side of the road. Later, a platinum-haired woman drives by. She is distracted and runs over something.... perhaps a dog. It starts to rain, the ditch quickly fills up with water.

Sophisticated and sensitive Argentinean director Lucretia Martel returns to the Cannes competition with The Headless Woman [+see also:
film review
trailer
film profile]. After The Swamp and the provocative The Holy Girl, Martel’s third film is a co-production between Argentina, Spain, France and Italy.

Maria Onetto is a wealthy woman in her 50s whose peaceful life is turned upside down by an unexpected event that projects her into a dream-like dimension. Did she run over a child? Did she go to the hospital for an x-ray? Did she really cheat on her husband in a hotel room with a cousin who has always been in love with her? Her world suddenly seems filled with ghosts and strange signals, and reality isn’t as important as before. But perhaps the ghosts are the poor people that surround the upper classes, destined only for the humblest of jobs.

Yet it is enough to change the colour of one’s hair, from blond to brown, for the ghosts to perhaps disappear and for everything to return to as it once was.

Martel shifts the camera inside her main character, drawing in just centimetres from her, examining her as Maria moves through familiar places as if she were no longer of the world. Thus, the director offers yet another look at a society that feels weighed down by an unknown unease. In The Swamp the characters sought solace in alcohol, here indifference is the medicine against guilt.

(Translated from Italian)