I do not take the critics’ polls in Film Comment as gospel, but I find them a useful point of reference, so it’s worth noting that Lucrecia Martel of Argentina was chosen the 2nd best new director of the decade (19th best overall), and of her three films to date, The Headless Woman came in at #2 of 2009 and #50 of the decade, with The Holy Girl (2004) at #56 and La Ciénaga (2001) at #62. I’ve (re)watched all three lately, and I’m beginning to see the point of all the acclaim.
Right from the beginning Martel has displayed the stamp of an auteur, with her own unique style and subject matter. Her eschewal of establishing shots is as much a metaphysical as a stylistic choice; she throws viewers into the middle of the action and let’s them fill in the picture. With tight framing in crowded scenes, what is offscreen is as important as what is shown, and that goes for sounds as well as what is cropped out of her images (the eponymous “headless woman” is not the only one). Instead of traditional storytelling, she relies on layering. The social setting, the situation, the characters are revealed bit by bit, laid in stroke by stroke, and not necessarily in the center of the screen.
Two innovations in her third film make that a good place to start. Putting the audience in the position of the central character, not from a subjective angle but somewhat askance, motivates us to try to piece the story together just as the “headless woman” does, focusing the suspense that in Martel’s previous films might be just puzzlement. She also goes widescreen, to allow even more information in at the edges of her frame.
Once you’ve seen the earlier two films, her whole approach begins to make sense and her personal obsessions emerge. What’s her thing with swimming pools? It seems like immersion in a supposedly refreshing environment that is actually contaminated. You definitely get the idea that she comes out of a large Catholic family in the provincial northwest of Argentina, where a comfortable but decadent middle class relies on native servants to maintain a seedy but luxurious style of living. While not overtly political in any way, her films are full of social comment, in a manner that may be more evident in Argentina than elsewhere. When you are sensitized to the class situation, her films seem steeped in it.
La Ciénaga translates as The Swamp, which is also the name Martel gives to her hometown region of Salta, where each of her films is set. It may also describe the family around which the film weaves, with vain and indolent drunks for parents, and five grown and growing children getting into various kinds of sexual mischief.
The Holy Girl maintains the hothouse atmosphere, where piety is deeply confused and intermingled with adolescent sexuality. A spookily intent girl is groped on the street and decides it is her vocation to save the molester from his transgressions, though she is excited by transgressions herself. He turns out to be a guest in a hotel her mother has inherited but hardly runs, in town for a doctors’ convention, and the mother takes a rather lascivious interest in him as well. Any summary of plot misses the point, offering no more than a thread through a labyrinth of desire and decay.
The Headless Woman loses her identity in a hit and run accident while driving, where her head is concussed and her conscience left behind, as she drives away without checking the body lying in the road. Gradually she puts the pieces of her life back together around the missing moral core, with her extended family gathering around protectively to save her from any consequences of her misdeed.
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