So several times now, we’ve effusively and enthusiastically discussed Argentinean filmmaker Lucrecia Martel’s latest picture, “The Headless Woman,” which is a woozy and disorienting picture essentially about psychic disembodiment. Or perhaps more simply about losing yourself after an accidental bump on the head in a non-life-threatening car crash prompts a kind of mental vertigo (apropos considering the subtle Kim Novak/Hitchcock allusions in the film).
So the big question: What’s next? It’s a genre that could put her on the map on a grander international scale the way “Let The Right One In” left its foreign film ghetto because it had vampires.
“It’s more of a science-fiction story with elements of horror, but yeah: It’s an idea I’ve had for a long time now—one that predates ‘The Headless Woman’ — and it will definitely be different. What can I say? I’m a big fan of monstrosities!” she told TimeOut New York recently.
It’s actually a project announced in the trades last May shortly before “The Headless Woman,” was selected to debut at the Cannes 2008 film festival . The project is actually an Argentinian-set alien-invasion film, called, ““El Eternauta,” based on the 1950s comic strip by writer Héctor Germán Oesterheld.
The film starts after a gigantic snowfall on Argentina and then follows a small group of survivors battling alien invaders and their army of giant insects.
But in a more recent interview with IndieWire she seems to cast doubt on the project somewhat.
“I am writing. I started a script before I was writing ‘The Headless Woman.’ I think we should put it in the fantasy genre. It is a strange kind of invasion. A threat to [a] garden. Unwanted or unknown relatives that appear in our houses and live in the garden. Real monsters. Well, I’m writing about this, but I do not know if it will be my next movie.”
That’s how the interview ends and while it’s not a huge cause for concern a) we want to continue to discuss Martel’s dizzying work and b) we’re extremely interested to see what her claustrophobic lens can do to the genre of sci-fi. Surely she could breathe some new life into it as auteurs usually do when they decide to take up the genre.
It’s really too soon to tell and if we can speculate a moment, perhaps her hesitation lies in the fact that she would likely need a fairly large budget and these aren’t exactly the most favorable economic times for putting on ambitious, foreign-language sci-fi films. We guess we’ll just wait and see, and fingers crossed, but whatever does eventually come next, we’ll be the first ones waiting in line.