The Headless Woman 2007

      This film is centered around Vero and she is an Argentinean bourgeois woman. It is about how her life slowly twists out of control after she hits something, or someone with her car.  This incident changes everything for Vero!!  As Veronica is driving, she is distracted by her cell phone and looks down at it.  By the time she does this, her car hits something but the camera remains in the car.  We see her car shaking and rattling?  Although Vero seems indifferent about the situation, it is clear that it has a toll on her.  She acts different from the Vero that we saw briefly at the beginning of the film.  She is clumsy and seems out of place, barely saying anything.  When she does speak, it doesn't always make sense or have a lot of substance.  This solidifies towards the end of the movie when she goes to retrace her steps to recover her memory.  But in the hospital and the Hotel she stayed, there is no record proving that she was there?  This makes the audience wonder if all this really happened or if Veronica dreamed or imagined it??

     This film is set among an extended wealthy family in ­Argentina.  Maria Onetto plays Verónica and she is an ­elegant, middle-aged woman who works as a dentist.  Driving back from a ­family ­get-together, Verónica hits something with her car.  Her forehead moves ­forward and appears to smash either into the steering wheel or the ­windshield and whiplashes back.  Verónica brakes and for a long, long ­moment, director Martel's camera holds the shot of her profile.  She sits immobile and silent in the car.  Is she in shock?  Is she gazing at what she has hit in the rear-view mirror?  

     For the first time, we see a child's handprint on the driver's-side window?  The handprint, in some kind of nightmarish continuity error appears to change position in the next shot?  But couldn't that just be from the kids who were playing around her car at the party earlier?  This is not an easy film to watch or to understand but the potency with which it resonates in the imagination is remarkable.  There is a spacey, floating style but it is applied to something painful. Relevant but also a psychologically real portrait.  It is demonstrating in both style and content what happens when we go into denial.  You can't quite be certain of exactly what The Headless Woman is about?  2 1/2*  (This movie is so-so)         

87 min, Drama directed and written by Lucrecia Martel with Maria Onetto, Claudia Cantero, Cesar Bordon, Daniel Genoud, Guillermo Arengo, Ines Efron, Alicia Muxo, Pia Uribelarrea, Maria Vaner, Andrea Verdun Maria Juarez.  

Note:  Imdb 6.6* out of 10* with 4802 reviews, The Guardian 5* Peter Bradshaw, Rotten Tomatoes 76% with 54 critic reviews 56% with 1000 audience scores, Amazon 4.1* out of 5* with 55 ratings, Metacritic 81 out of 100 with 12 critic reviews 6.8 out of 10 with 26 user scores, Letterboxd 3.6* out of 5* with 74 fans.

Special Note:  The song playing on the car radio at the time when the accident happens is "Soley Soley" by the appropriately named group Middle of the Road.  This film was chosen for position 89 in the list of the best 100 films of the 21st century by the BBC.