![]() ![]() She appears dazed and barely recognizes the people around her but continues smiling incessantly. Soon she drives off to be x-rayed at the local hospital while the radio plays Nana Mouskouri's "Soleil Soleil", a song that was popular in the seventies. Eventually she gets out of the car but simply stands there while the first drops of a heavy storm pound the windshield and we can see mysterious fingerprints on the side window. She thinks she sees a dog in the rear view mirror but does not turn around to get a closer look. She stops the car but is unable or unwilling to step outside to see what happened. Whether or not she has hit something, a dog or a person, is unclear because the woman is frozen into inaction for what seems to be an eternity. Suddenly she feels a thud and her head is thrust backward, then forward onto the dash. While driving home by herself, she hears the ring of her cell phone and is momentarily distracted from the road. One woman (Maria Onetto) stands out because of the bleached blond color of her flowing hair that comes down to her shoulders The woman, Veronica (called Vero by her acquaintances), runs a dental clinic with her brother but we know nothing else about her life, past or present. Children are being shepherded in and out of cars while one mother, Josefina (Claudia Cantero) models her eyelashes in the car window. Meanwhile, a group of friends prepare to leave a gathering. The atmosphere is one that portends danger. The Headless Woman opens on a rural road in Salta Province in northwest Argentina where four young boys and their dog are engaged in risky play along the highway as a car approaches. What is more important is that Martel has taken us effortlessly into the head of the main character as persuasively as any film in recent memory and has turned one woman's failings into a clear and simple statement of her own vision. Characters come and go, seemingly unrelated incidents pile up, and we hardly know who is who, but little of that ultimately matters. ![]() Shown at the Vancouver Film Festival, The Headless Woman, like Martel's earlier works, defies conventional cinematic language and can be challenging to appreciate on first viewing. Warner Bros.Argentine politics from the 1970s and class differences of today play an important role in Lucrecia Martel's third film, The Headless Woman, the story of a middle-aged woman refusing to confront the truth about a hit and run accident. María Onetto, Claudia Cantero, Inés Efron, César Bordón, Guillermo Arengo, Daniel Genoud, María VanerĮl Deseo, Slot Machine, Teodora Film, R&C Produzioni Everything returns to normal and the bad moment seems to be over until the news of a gruesome discovery again worries everyone. Friends close to the police confirm that there were no accident reports. They go back to the road only to find a dead dog. One night she tells her husband that she killed someone on the highway. She just lets herself be taken by the events of her social life. On the days following this incident, she fails to recognize the feelings that bond her to things and people. She becomes distracted and runs over something. ![]()
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