Cinephiles said similar things about the then-radical films of Michelangelo Antonioni and Alain Resnais. They also spent hours, if you can imagine, discussing the movies’ meanings and themes. Martel’s films invite equally intense conversations.
María Onetto and Inés Efron in a scene from Lucrecia Martel’s ‘The Headless Woman,’ 2008. (Courtesy of BAMPFA)
“Whenever you manage, through cinema, to cast doubt on the assumed nature of things, you might be approaching something really interesting,” Martel said in a 2019 interview with the Museum of Modern Art’s online journal post: notes on art in a global context. “And when you have done that once, there’s no way back. Because once you become aware of what makes no sense, never again can reality manage to completely hide its quality of disguise.”
La ciénaga (The Swamp) is a fraught, impressionistic portrait of two decaying middle-class families. The Holy Girl (2004) explores the twisted entanglement between a doctor attending a conference, a confused-by-religion teenager and her divorced mother. The Headless Woman (2008) follows a well-off woman in the aftermath of a hit-and-run accident. Zama (adapted from Antonio di Benedetto’s 1956 novel) is likewise a portrait of privilege, stasis and desperation, although it more explicitly acknowledges colonial and (by extension) contemporary prejudice and exploitation.
Because Martel resists convention, plot summaries only convey the surface of her movies. Nor can synopses convey the importance of the outdoors — the natural world, certainly, but the land as identification, inheritance, history — as an embedded theme. The recurring presence of Indigenous people in various roles (employees, servants, children on the side of a highway), whether acknowledged by the characters or not, is a reminder to audiences of Argentina’s past and present.
A scene from Lucrecia Martel’s ‘The Holy Girl,’ 2004. (Courtesy of BAMPFA)
Martel’s films are populated with adults so enmeshed in lives of pointless desperation that they lose touch with their children. If they can deny reality to the degree that their kids aren’t a priority, they are surely indifferent to a larger historical and geographic perspective.
There is an immediacy and energy to Martel’s work that hooks us and commands our attention, and feels completely of the moment. And although her films are rooted in specific Argentine experience and history, their invocations of the intersection of power and gender, and power and class, feel especially relevant now to (North) American audiences.
I have heard it described as cognitive dissonance. The comfort and complacency that has long existed in a certain strata of American society can’t continue, not in the same way and with the same obliviousness, in a tidal wave of increasing inequality, reduced rights, ICE detention centers, ongoing war, bottomless lies and a collapse of the moral code.
If we can recognize ourselves in Lucrecia Martel’s characters — selfish, ridiculous, dumbstruck, unmoored, committed to a failed system — we might begin to live in the urgency of now.
‘Lucrecia Martel: Un destino común’ plays April 4–19, 2026 at the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (2155 Center St., Berkeley).