Under the influence of a reckless moment: The Headless Woman

It begins with an accident on a country road. The driver, the sole occupant of the vehicle, stops the car, but keeps her eyes forward. Her name is Verónica, or Vero, for short. She does not examine what it is she’s run over, and this moment of decision or neglect or shock and confusion extends like a prolonged exhalation—or better yet, like a scream trapped in one’s throat. The moment is maddeningly still, chilling, and transfixing. Vero composes herself and drives on.

Things start to get strange. Vero goes to a hospital to be examined. She goes to a hotel instead of going home, even though home doesn’t seem that far away. She sleeps with a man who is not her husband, whether out of habit or in a sudden fit of desire is uncertain. She takes a shower with her clothes on. Of course, we don’t know yet where her home is. We don’t know yet who her husband is. We don’t know yet that she even has a husband. Exposition has been forsaken in lieu of something tantalizingly ambiguous. We’re asked to collect clues on our own, to stay a little more alert than most movies ask us to be. If you treasure the experience of entering a mystery blind you might want to consider just watching The Headless Woman (2008) and reading the rest of this later.

Vero’s behaviour is as compelling as her motives are nearly inscrutable, to the degree that certain sequences become comical, such the one that finds Vero sitting calmly in the waiting room of a dental clinic, as though she’s a patient and not one of the resident dentists. Vero banged her head in the collision—does she suffer from amnesia? There are more than enough noir flourishes in The Headless Woman to suggest such a movie-movie conceit. There’s something sufficiently elliptical in this slowly unraveling tale to suggest that all that follows may be the depiction of some extended fugue state. We’re immersed in subjectivity. We’ve perhaps entered a dream, but if so it isn’t a dream of mist and echoes but one of precise and vivid realist detail. One from which one doesn’t ever entirely wake.

This is the third film from the Argentine director Lucrecia Martel, who had something of an art house hit with The Holy Girl (04), which is warmer than this latest film and actually a sort of comedy. Martel’s uncompromising sense of open-endedness and refusal to orient audiences either narratively or morally is tempered by her humour, her singular eye for fascinatingly peculiar bits of human interaction, and her immaculate, almost classical craftsmanship—a combination that’s allowed her to make her last two films under the auspices of the Almodóvar brothers, who are credited as co-producers. Although it played in very few theatres in Canada and the US, The Headless Woman is now available on DVD from Stand Releasing, which means that we can watch and re-watch it and piece together the shards of Vero’s posttraumatic daze. Once you do it’s surprising how coherent Martel’s narrative actually is—there isn’t a minute of this movie that’s not integral of the whole.

Yet the film’s brilliance, what makes you want to bother to seek out this coherence in the first place, is that no matter how much plot you glean certain shadows linger, expanding beyond the immediate story until it spreads into the sociological. Vero’s world is one where race and class-based inequities are less discreet than ours, and the meaning of her crime in this context can hardly be missed. When Vero gradually begins to recall or accept what’s transpired and attempts to resolve the situation however she can, the film’s creepier implications are revealed. She needn’t worry about her hit and run being discovered because there are others of her same social standing who, like friendly little elves, are cleaning up her mess while she recovers.

As remarkable as Martel’s writing and direction is, The Headless Woman would still be only half a movie were it not for the central performance of María Onetto. With her bottle-blonde hair—which she eventually changes, like a guilty heroine from Hitchcock—her heavy lidded eyes, and her sedate smile that could speak to some inner mischief as easily as serenity, Onetto reminds me most of some tranquilized version of Gena Rowlands in A Woman Under the Influence (74). Neither ingratiating nor alienating, Onetto doesn’t judge Vero but instead fully embodies her to the point where, against all odds, we identify with her. As with many a noir protagonist, we know she’s done something at least a little awful, even if we’re unsure of the gravity of the consequences of her actions—yet we can’t take our eyes off of her. And neither can Martel, who frames Onetto in ways that are endlessly curious, paying special attention to her neck and ears. Martel and Onetto insist on our intimacy if we’re to stick with the film, until by the end we too feel a little headless, totally intrigued, entertained, creeped out, and probably wondering what these women will do next.

Men at Work: Eagle Pennell's The Whole Shootin' Match and A Hell of a Note arrive on DVD

As the studio-backed auteur films of the 1970s climbed into the stratosphere, those delirious heights from which the whole heady shotgun wedding of art and commerce would soon come crashing down, another American cinema slowly emerged from the rich soil of the marginalized. Independent movies of this second golden age were so often “regional,” if not in geography than in spirit, showing us faces, places and activity typically ignored and doing so through an industrial model infinitely more modest than the one available to the movie brats who conquered Hollywood. These movies were made cheaply and required tireless work, often made on weekends between regular jobs over very long periods of time. Maybe that’s partly why so many of the lasting images of the independents from the 70s concern men at work. From Peter Falk’s convivial crew in A Woman Under the Influence (1974) to Henry Sanders’ inward abattoir labourer in Killer of Sheep (77), blue-collar life and the poles of wild times and desperate dreams of transcendence it engenders found a new and often exhilarating level of expression. Yet one of the most indelible and entertaining examples of the working man’s movie, one that’s genuinely regional in every sense of the term—save racially—has been long forgotten and is only now making a celebrated return.

Watchmaker Film has lovingly packaged the first DVD release of The Whole Shootin’ Match (78), the feature debut of a scrawny Texan named Eagle Pennell, accompanied by A Hell of a Note (77), his 25-minute dry run which showcases the same inspired comic pairing of actors Sonny Carl Davis and Lou Perryman. Authenticity is a precarious word to throw around when discussing movies, but if we invoke it to describe how temperament and tendencies reflect content, than Pennell’s the real thing. He told stories about strangely lovable—and occasionally detestable—losers, dreamers and drinkers whose shaggy charm could never be accused of benefiting from excess polish. And these films, reputedly constructed from single takes, sometimes under-lit, sometimes overexposed, radiate ramshackle enthusiasm. There are bits of humour in Pennell’s work, not to mention certain images of vast landscapes or gloomy bars, that are so instantly winning, yet they’d never satisfy the technical or storytelling standards of even the most slouching film academy. They exude faith in the pleasures of watching human behaviour and in only the most mundane forms of catharsis, blotchy black and white and boom shadows be damned. Their narratives are the narratives of country songs, and they speak to the inner life of the labourer. In one memorable scene, a character watches a movie and sincerely wonders what the director does for a living.

A Hell of a Note announces the sense of flow that is Pennell’s modus operandi. It’s first sequence finds Davis and Perryman resigning from roof tarring in a marvelously fluid gesture: they both whip it out and piss on the as-yet un-tarred roof, their streams of urine converging into a creeping puddle heading strait toward the boots of their cranky and imminently former employer. They then head to a bar to drown sorrows, meet girls, get in awesomely awkward fights, dance, and ponder new opportunities. A sudden injection of tragedy brings it all to a grinding halt, but most of A Hell of a Note is cyclical and un-dramatic, the sense of inevitability kept buoyant by often sublime gags and an endearing undercurrent of friendship declared.

This is even more the case with The Whole Shootin’ Match, which features no such tragic conclusion but rather builds up to a moment of clarity, or at least as close to one as this hillbilly Hope and Crosby can hope to approximate. Loyd (Perryman) and Frank (Davis) have evidently been pals a long while, having collaborated in a number of failed get-rich-quick schemes, everything from a flying squirrel farm to the chinchilla business. Things kick off as Loyd proposes another dazzling new enterprise: polyurethane. Hang onto your hats.

The distinctions between Perryman and Davis’ characters are more pronounced here. Loyd is the persistent optimist and inventor. One of my favourite scenes conveys Loyd’s silent glee over his crafting of a spinning wand that makes bubbles. Frank is the philandering family man whose innate cheerfulness and obvious love of Loyd keep him within safe distance of depression and complete alcoholic collapse. As the story ambles on its way, with more bars, fights, dancing, drinking and working en route, Loyd and Frank are teased by success when Loyd’s new super-mop—he has a revelation in an automated car wash—gets picked up by a local manufacturer who gives them a whopping $1000 just for signing a contract. You can probably guess how things turn out. The final sequence finds them looking for Indian treasure in the hills outside Austin and coming to what feels like some sort of fork in the road, even if neither of them is entirely cognizant of the fact.

Perryman and Davis embody the dreams of those Americans who feel alienated by the larger society they inhabit yet never stop trying, in that deeply American way, to beat the system. Pennell connected with his characters so strongly that his own story came to resemble theirs even as he revealed an artistic vision never granted to them. Pennell nurtured a legend of failed potential all too aligned with his body of work, and he died, following years of drinking, professional and personal self-sabotage, and even intermittent homelessness, in July of 2002. He was just shy of 50. It’s a shame he didn’t stick around long enough to see what sort of success his good ol’ boys would achieve. His best work survives and will continue to do so.