Content area
Full Text
La mujer sin cabeza. Dir. Lucrecia Martel. Argentina, 2008. Dur. 87 min.
Incomprehensible by design, subjectively narrated - the extent of the information given is restricted to that known to the protagonist, whose psychological depths are plumbed, as David Bordwell might write - La mujer sin cabeza is Lucrecia Mattel's third feature film, released in cinema in Argentina and elsewhere in 2008. The Martel faithful will recognize stylistic and thematic affinities with her previous features, La ciénaga (2001) and La niña santa (2004), in the representation of societal stratifications of the provincial Argentine city of Salta, the force fields of desire that ignore all norms and the quiet formal virtuosism that foregrounds the intrusive presence of the unknown over the known.
Martel is one the key contributors to the decade-old rebirth of independent Argentine cinema known as the nuevo cine argentino, first with the 1995 short Rey muerto, then her 2001 opera prima La ciénaga, and La niña santa of 2004. Those features managed to articulate class and gender tensions while avoiding the didactic feel that often lessens contemporary socially-themed films. La mujer sin cabeza takes Mattel's project a step further by masterfully employing what Pier Paolo Pasolini called cinematic free indirect discourse, in which, like its literary variant, the filmmakers' stylistic...