Comments on: NYFF: The Headless Woman (2008)

By: Coiron

Coiron — Fri, 09 Jan 2009 19:03:17 +0000

things are like this; she run over something… she stops and continue driving. we don’t see her looking back. But there is an omniscient shot of god on the side of the road.
when she come back with her husband to check the things out… he said; you killed a god, you scared, you killed a dog… but as viewers we never see the dog in fact again… that’s the most fascinating thing about this movie! It make us complicit of something that we don’t know exactly if it took place for first! we are complicit in denying and covering up a truth that scare us.

By: Osvaldo

Osvaldo — Fri, 12 Dec 2008 23:58:03 +0000

I agree with md’a: it is startingly clear that she has run over an animal. I am baffled by ALL the reviews that hold that it may very well be a person. Not so.

By: md'a

md'a — Sun, 12 Oct 2008 19:42:59 +0000

When the screenshot becomes available, you will see that it’s unmistakably a dog. There is certainly no possibility whatsoever that it’s a human being. Martel is too cool to provide a close-up, but the only conceivable function of this shot is to ensure that we know what Vero actually hit. The only way to make a case for ambiguity is to argue that this shot exists solely in her mind, which I find too far-fetched to credit.

By: DrMabuse

DrMabuse — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:25:20 +0000

The fact of the matter, md’a, is that the shot is filmed with the dead corpse — whether boy, dog, or calf — at least thirty feet away from the camera. And unless someone can furnish me with a DVD or a screenshot, I’m going to stick with Martel’s visual insinuation that we SHOULDN’T know what it is and that we are intended to share in Vero’s subjective experience. The image is most certainly unreliable if you have the good fortune of seeing this in the theater for the first time.

By: md'a

md'a — Thu, 09 Oct 2008 06:06:59 +0000

“Vero, you see, has driven over what may be a boy or a calf”

I’m really puzzled by the apparent confusion over this point. We see very clearly what she hits, and it’s neither a boy nor a calf. It’s a dog. I just saw the film a second time and that’s not even remotely ambiguous. We clearly see a dog, and we see it in an omniscient shot, not from what would ostensibly be Vero’s POV. So you can’t even argue that the image is somehow unreliable.

There is no crime in this movie. That is in fact what makes it so fascinating.