franco wrote:This is more or less the same movie as La Ciénaga, except that this time there's an major event that propels the narrative all the way to the end. Also, instead of having bewildered audiences, we have a discombobulated protagonist. Martel has indeed mastered her shallow-focus style of filmmaking. It is simply exquisite, and the film is easily a masterpiece. I do not understand how the Cannes audiences managed to boo this gem - although it appears that (apparently) they never had a chance to boo La Ciénaga first.
Franco's piece chimes a lot with my feelings on the film. It's a beautiful meditation on class and race, real and perceived guilt and messy relationships. However Barmy's and Grand Illusion's comments are also interesting in their own ways.
Barmy talks of the way that "you can't tell who anyone is", and in all three films we are thrown into the middle of family or professional gatherings. However the relationships all make themselves clear over the course of the film - it is also the development of these relationships that lead to some of the major developments, such as the connection between the girl that the Doctor had been rubbing up against (by accident or design?) in the street who later becomes obsessed with him in The Holy Girl and the lady he has been seducing back at the hotel, who is revealed (to him but not the viewer, as we have been aware of their connection since the beginning) as the girl's mother which kicks off the final section of real and perceived guilt in much the same manner as the road accident in The Headless Woman does at the beginning of that film.
María Onetto's performance is absolutely fantastic, which it should be since she is really the entire focus of The Headless Woman. The previous two films are generally split between two or three major characters. In La Ciénaga, which is more of an ensemble piece, the two cousins with their own families feel as if they are the primary characters to me, along with the daughter of Mecha. However in that film there are also jumps to follow Mecha's son and his wife (who, in an awkward
Damage-style, though more understated, turn of events had an affair with Mecha's husband a while before); the vaguely lesbian relationship of Mecha's daughter and the Indian maid Isabel (which contains some nice moments of vaguely understood class barriers in the way that the privileged character is being submissive to her object of desire but only on her terms, while the maid appears totally uninterested throughout! As she would be, since she is carrying on her own relationship which only comes to the forefront near the end of the film); the young son who has a fear of an unseen dog beyond his walled garden (and whose attempts to face up to that fear leads to a Yi Yi-esque (albeit tragic) ending); while Mecha as the matriarch retires to her bed for the majority of the film, as if willing herself to follow in her bed-ridden mother's footsteps.
The Holy Girl narrows this wide focus down to the three main characters of the woman who owns the hotel, her religious daughter and the doctor staying in the hotel for a conference. Each have their own circle of characters surrounding them (the employees, the daughter's friends and her prayer circle, the doctor's colleagues), but here those characters feel more obviously to be acting as support to the main trio.
And then The Headless Woman narrows this down totally into the focus on one character, with no jumps to another's perspective. It heightens the sense of separateness from the rest of the cast, and it is to Onetto's great credit that she can carry it off and create so many responses in the viewer - I perceived her at times as unthinkingly aloof from those around her and at others aching for contact but being unable to break through (such as the moment near the end where she is trying, in an embarassing manner, to make small talk with the brother of the boy she thinks she may have killed, offering him everything from a drink, to clothes, to the offer of a bath!)
Grand Illusion is correct in a sense when he says that the blatant prologue to The Headless Woman 'removes the mystery' (It is also, in its threatening undertones, a clear call back to both the gang of children left to their own devices by the feckless adults roaming the woods with their gun throughout La Ciénaga and the scene in The Holy Girl where the daughter and her friends go to look at what could be a severed hand in a ditch by the side of the road and then after a brief glance, and while screaming excitedly, run across the road without looking and almost get run over). It is not the mystery of what Vero runs over that is at the heart of the film (there's the clear shot of the dog by the side of the road, but also the prologue shows the boy trapped in the canal, from which he is later found drowned), but the way that this incident has thrown her off balance in her life. Is this simply a head trauma caused by the accident or is it something that had been slowly building up to this point previously?
One of the subplots of the film (feeling inspired by one of the offscreen subplots in La Ciénaga) involves Vero and her sister caring for their aunt who has dementia, and the suggestion that it runs in the family. Is Vero suffering from an onset of this, or is she perhaps influenced by the idea that she could have it into having psychosomatic symptoms? Much as Mecha in La Ciénaga seemed to use the excuse of the incident at the beginning of the film to take after her mother and retire to her bed.
It is interesting that the film almost comes to an end at the halfway point, as Vero has confessed her fears and had them allayed by there having been no reports of any accident. Then on a trip she comes across the authorities dragging the canal next to the road where she had the accident for a body, and this is something which allows her to continue on with the guilt she feels. I like the way that this highlights the way that the guilt is essentially all in Vero's head (except for the running over of a dog though nobody in the film, even Vero, seems the slightest bit concerned about the death of an animal).
I particularly like the way that Vero is trying to relate to the various Indian characters in the film, but does so in a manner that only exposes the essential inequalities of the society and the class. She hugs the janitor and breaks down in the school changing rooms because she can't conceal her distress due to the water being out, but that touching moment with a stranger then has to be recomposed into a transaction, as he gets some bottled water for her (though the fact that she wishes him a good day as she leaves is quite a significant moment in itself, for at least acknowledging his assistance). There is also the gardener (not to mention the servants) that Vero is physically close to but also completely separate from, unable to acknowledge. This gets its fullest expression when she orders some pots from the place where the boy who died used to work (after a couple of visits and investigation, taking up the bulk of the second half of the film, reveals this to her) and then abstractedly (and condescendingly) tries to offer the boy's brother some kind of compensation in providing secondhand T-shirts, food or use of her washing facilities. She's trying to atone for something she cannot really comprehend.
And while the 'mystery' of who she runs over on the road is a complete red-herring, there is that stunning ending to the film which suggests the entire post-accident sequence of early in the film, including Vero's stay in the hotel and the implied adulterous impulsive sex with her sister's husband, which has coloured the film throughout but never been mentioned again, was all a delusion on Vero's part. Which suggests that Vero was placing her feelings of anxiety into an entirely different place all along.
