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Wednesday, 10 March 2010 |
As Alan Frank scathingly wrote about Tarkovsky's Solaris, The Headless Woman sees writer-director Lucrecia Martel "mistaking obfuscation for art." A desperately disappointing follow-up to 2001's The Swamp (La ciénaga) and 2004's The Holy Girl (La niña santa) - both of which suggested Martel was among South America's most promising and accomplished film-makers - it's the story of a middle-class woman who knocks over a dog with her car and suffers a minor head injury that produces an unsettling mental dislocation. As she drifts through her family and professional life, she's increasingly tormented by suspicions that she might have actually killed a child rather than a dog.
And the audience is also tormented by suspicions that (a) our heroine may be experience some kind of posthumous Carnival of Souls type hallucination, and/or that (b) there's precious little substance beneath Martel's carefully-controlled atmosphere of enigmatic insinuation. By the end, the former seems to have been conclusively eliminated; the latter is more a matter of individual perception.
Hailed as a genuine masterpiece by many critics around the world after premiering in competition at Cannes 2008, The Headless Woman smacks of a film-maker who has paid far too much attention to the glowing reviews that greeted her earlier work, and who doesn't know how to play to her strengths. Both The Swamp and The Holy Girl were essentially noisy, overcrowded ensemble pieces - The Headless Woman is much more of a character-study of a particular individual, albeit one who is evidently intended as indictment of a whole social class. Perhaps even a whole nation (it's not too fanciful to read the whole thing as an allegory of how Argentinian society turned a blind eye to the "disappearance" of political undesirables during its not-so-long-ago spells of military dictatorship.)
But whereas Martel's intentions are bold and intriguing, something has gone very wrong in terms of their execution: The Headless Woman is a classic example of slowness for slowness's sake, filled with details of plot-development and character motivation that make sense only in terms of scriptwriting contrivance than anything connected with reality. As the distrait Vero, María Onetto copes well enough given the circumstances - trouble is, she's given desperately little to go on. And so are we.
Neil Young
11th March, 2010
La mujer sin cabeza : Argentina/France/Italy/Spain
¦ The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, UK, 10.Mar.10 (£6.00) ¦
much better : La mujer sin piano (Woman Without Piano) by Javier Rebollo (Spain 2009)
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Sunday, 07 March 2010 |
Exit Through the Gift Shop is ostensibly a documentary about a Los Angeles-based Frenchman named Thierry Guetta, who went from obsessively filming the nocturnal exploits of street-art/graffiti notables such as Shepard Fairey to becoming an overnight-sensation modern artist himself, despite having little or no talent himself to speak of.
But after a little while we wonder whether the whole thing is in fact some kind of elaborate put-on, and that the Guetta is as "real" as his artistic alter-ego 'Mr Brain Wash.' In any case, do we really need another exposé of the modern art scene, analysing the hems and stitches of the latest emperor's new clothes?
Monsieur l'empereur himself is a somewhat annoying presence, burbling away via interview clips presented in boilerplate talking-head style - indeed, complete with arch voiceover from Rhys Ifans, Exit Through the Gift Shop, while amusing and occasionally stimulating in its multi-layered ideas and self-referentialism, is surprisingly conventional in its approach to supposedly confrontational and transgressive material. Or is that part of the point/gag/joke, to which only the filmmakers themselves are privy?
The most "original" element is the fact that (in accordance with those original Dogme 95 tenets laid down by Lars Von Trier and co) no director is listed, even though an opening credit announces this to be 'A Banksy Film', in reference to the enigmatic Bristolian graffiti/street-artist who supposedly pops up (with face obscured and voice vocoded) as one of Guetta's collaborators/influences. But if this really is Banksy's directorial debut, it's so far away from the cutting-edge smartness of his usual output that he really should stick to the day-job (or rather night-job) from now on.
Neil Young
7th March, 2010
¦ The Tyneside Cinema, Newcastle, UK, 7.Mar.10 (£7.00) ¦
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