‘The Headless Woman’ Hits Theaters This Weekend: Why You Should Attend…If You Can

Hate to keep harping on about this, but when film writers and bloggers bitch about the small, not-wide-enough release of indie films they tend to be male dominated pictures; war films (“The Hurt Locker”), sci-fi films (“Moon”) or vampire films that happen to also be foreign films (“Let The Right One In” — when was the last time you remember the geek sites being excited for a Swedish picture?)

The complaining is always highly selective and conveniently omits that plenty of great films get indie or limited small releases every month, but no one bats an eye or campaigns for them because… they don’t have explosions, blood or clones? We’re not sure.

But if we are going to actively crusade for a worthy picture, why not campaign for Argentinian filmmaker Lucrecia Martel’s dizzying and disorienting third, feature-length film, “The Headless Woman,” which is hitting theaters in super limited release this weekend.

How small? It has all of a 12-day run at New York’s Film Forum and presumably not anything more (or at all) anywhere else besides L.A.

But the praise and quotes from noteworthy critics is breathless. The New York Times (Holden and Dargis), the Village Voice (J. Hoberman), Salon (Andrew O’Hehir) and Film Comment are just a few that have waxed totally effu. But our favorite quote might be from The Hollywood Reporter, that calls Martel, “a master of visual and aural technique, which is on full and splendid display.” They’re dead on. She’s a beautiful formalist that acutely understands the language of cinema, while purposely subverting narrative to get her psychic aims across (her previous two films, “La Cienega” and “La Nina Santa” are also favorites).

Here’s what we wrote when we first found out the film had distribution in March. “We’ve been championing this film since we saw it at the New York Film Festival last fall and were bowled over by its intentionally discombobulating eschewing of film grammar (no establishing shots, breaking the invisible line, clipped editing and strange spatial frame relation). It actually messed with our equilibrium, which is exactly how you’re meant to feel. It’s a creepy and anxiety-ridden experience, but a powerful piece of work and a testament to the Argentinian filmmakers keenly observing eye.”

This quote from Time Out New York is pretty perfect too as they call the picture, an “astounding portrait of a person entirely out of sync with her own existence” (they also give the picture a perfect score).

So what’s it about? According to the basic synopsis, it’s a “mysterious and intriguing tale of a woman who may have killed someone or something while driving on a dirt road. Dazed and confused, she tries to piece together what happened, while her husband systematically tries to erase her tracks.”

What’s also wonderful and masterful about the picture is how none of its disorienting conceits are obvious on any kind of level. It’s like your brain is subconsciously being burrowed into and you don’t even know it. The haunting and immensely powerful element of the purposely dense film is how it so precisely conveys the sense of losing oneself which is actually kind of terrifying in a low-calibrated hum kind of manner; as if you’re slowly going mad and are only attuned to it when it’s too late. We actually shudder a little bit when we think about it and it’s a picture that stayed with us far long after it was over, which to us, is always a good sign.

Blah, blah, blah, we suppose. Here’s the trailer. It opens in very limited release this weekend and we put it at No. 4 in our Top 20 films of 2008 list, though yes, technically the film didn’t come out until this year. It’s a must-see picture so do what you can to see it and if it doesn’t make its way into your town, remember to flag it when it hits DVD.