“It’s like an Antonioni film without the ennui,” I said to a friend after seeing Lucretia Martel’s impeccably opaque The Headless Woman, which opens at Film Forum today. This, he said, was what he liked about it — that Martel one-ups her forebears in the Cinema of Disorientation by refusing to seduce the audience with a mirror to their own emotional dissatisfaction. And that is great, and skillful, and interesting … but I miss the ennui.

It’s likely that this is the point of The Headless Woman – Martel rips Antonioniennui off its foundations by refusing to throw the audience a bone of indentification via the disorienting effects of lust/love. The Headless Woman deals with sex twice, in two separate encounters both coded as inappropriate; the film seemingly has no use for desire beyond its ability to show up depravity and mental disability. ‘

On further contemplation, I think Martel does, in fact, ask the viewer to find ways to relate to the post-traumatic stress/psychosis of Vero, a middle-aged woman who returns physically but not mentally to her bourgeois life after a car accident. Wandering through social and professional committments in a daze, Vero becomes convinced that she hit and killed a boy with her vehicle. Using swift cuts and temporal ellipses to toss us into Vero’s point of view, allowing us no frame of reference as to how she “normally” behaves or what the natural circumstances of her life even look like, Martel forces the viewer to engage by tapping into their own deeply-rooted anxieties about the nature of consciousness.

But the thing about existential despair is that it has nowhere to go (except for, possibly, Zabriskie Point); only in science fiction can characters go down the rabbit role of consciousness-questioning and come out with an answer. In Antonioni films, romance is a sham escape option — there is no way out, but in the films as in life, sometimes we can turn to another person to make us forget that — and a glimmer of hope, if only temporarily. Martel withholds hope. Antonioni’s films revolve around questions like, “Is my beautiful life sheltering me from the truth, and if so will sex make that better?” Martel’s film asks, “Is my beautiful life sheltering me from the truth, and if so can I live with not being able to do much about that?” Martel’s film does offer the darker, more realistic vision of Our Existential Trap, but for the viewer this cuts both ways. There is no false out, but there is also no pleasure.