Tuesday, September 01, 2009

The Headless Woman


I assumed at first that the upper-class Argentinian dentist in Lucrecia Martel's The Headless Woman was suffering from severe brain damage following a small car accident, only no one cared about her enough to notice. Neat premise, but do we need to watch her smile with false serenity and hang up on people for a full 90 minutes to get it?

Once her conversation skills returned, it became clear she was simply concerned that the dead dog we saw lying in the street was actually a lower class orphan, or maybe she hit a dog and an orphan, and did she really stay in that hotel the night after and how do we really know anything and do we really need to watch her smile with false serenity for a full 90 minutes to get that the rich are detached from consequence and experience? Imagine Michael Haneke's Cache if you took out the MacGuffins and left those menacingly banal shots of someone silently making left turns.

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