With 10 films already under our belt, we arrive on Monday for our first weekday cinematic tripleheader. Alice is starting her day by taking in this year’s Bollywood film Ghajini and I will be watching The Headless Woman from rising Argentine director Lucrecia Martel. This is not an easy film because the audience spends a fair amount of the film disoriented because the main character Verónica or Vero (Maria Onetto) has become disoriented by what she has run into on the road. We never see exactly what she has hit, but she stops briefly and then drives away. We follow her subsequent to this and clearly see how undone she has become—she is the woman without her head. We are also witness to some fairly banal activities in the life that surrounds her. This gives the film the rhythm and the apparent meaninglessness of real everyday life—only in the movies does a single cough presage impending death. It is difficult that many of the characters—particularly the men who play significant roles in Vero’s life—look alike and many others are never introduced and pass through her milieu unnamed. Eventually, we become aware that something horrible has happened to a young boy and Vero begins to recognize the awful thing that she has done. Yet hers is a world of privilege and entitlement based on her being a white professional woman. Martel has crafted a film about what having special status in society can mean. This is well-executed with an excellent central performance by Onetto and solid production values, yet disorienting and deliberately paced which can be frustrating for film audiences that have generally been trained to expect to have stories laid out clearly marked and quickly revealed.

I chose to see Lorna’s Silence as my second film of the day. This was a film that Alice and I had seen in Toronto last September. It is another difficult and dark story from Luc and Jean-Pierre Dardenne (La Promesse, Rosetta, The Son, and The Child). This one is about what unholy bargains have to be struck to achieve legal status as an immigrant. Lorna (Arta Dobroshi) is a beautiful young Albanian woman who has married drug addict Claudy Moreau (Jérémie Renier) solely so she can become a Belgian citizen. She is planning to open a snackbar with her boyfriend Sokol, but before their life together can begin she is to marry a Russian who is also seeking legal Belgian citizenship status. What about her current husband Claudy? There, as Shakespeare put it, is the rub. Lorna is caught in a horrible moral dilemma regarding how she is to be extricated from this marriage. Fabio, the shady broker for sham marriages and other nefarious enterprises, wants her to be a widow while she would like to leave the marriage as a divorcée. We follow Lorna through each day and she is, fortunately, an actress the camera truly loves. Every move she makes, every breath she takes is lovingly admired. The film’s denouement directly springs from a critical scene between Lorna and Claudy that is at odds with how their behavior has demarcated their relationship. The film ends ambiguously and this demands that the filmgoers help create how Lorna’s situation resolves. Significantly due to how much the camera admires her, this film is a thoroughly engaging which stands up to a second viewing.

After Lorna’s Silence, I headed to the Waterville Opera House to join my wife. She was watching the program of short films known as Maine Shorts. When that finished we would be able to see the film Know Your Mushrooms that we had sponsored in memory of Alice’s mother Dorothy Crandall LaFontaine. Dorothy was an avid mushroom hunter and knew one of the film’s subjects Gary Lincoff. The film is playful and fun preferring to tease and intrigue as opposed to overburden the filmgoer with lots of facts—though it is doubtless that most filmgoers are probably going to know a lot more about mushrooms than they did when they came into the theater. Though the film doesn’t choose to make the hallucinogenic potential of mushrooms the raison d’être for the film, one of the most entertaining sequences is Lincoff’s description of an out-of-body experience induced by ingesting a particular type of mushrooms. While that type of behavior isn’t something that Dorothy espoused, we are confident that Dorothy would have approved of the film and how it will enlighten people about the opportunities for better living through mushrooms.