THE HEADLESS WOMAN directed by Lucrecia Martel (Argentina, 2008)
Suspense, suspicion, guilt, crisis of identity and paranoia were all vital ingredients in Alfred Hitchcock’s most memorable movies. The Headless Woman (La Mujer Sin Cabeza) contains all of these but in a deliberately reduced, even sedated, form and the one vital element that is absent is a crime.
The story revolves totally around a blonde woman (played by María Onetto) who is convinced she has killed a young boy in a car accident. Whether this happened or not remains one of a number of ambiguities in this fascinating film.
The incident that sets the story in motion happens when the woman, Verónica (Vero), is driving home. She is momentarily distracted when her mobile phone rings and hits something in the road. She stops the car but doesn’t get out. She sits frozen for a moment, perhaps in shock or panic but shows no emotion. We see hand prints on the driver’s side window, probably those of kids who we saw playing around her car before she started her journey but, now, we can’t be so sure.
The woman puts on her sunglasses and drives away. In the rear view mirror we see what she doesn’t; it looks like a dead dog. After driving on for a short distance, she stops the car again and gets out. The camera doesn’t follow but we see her pacing up and down. It begins to rain – she returns to the car and drives on.
Lucrecia Martel
The movie has no soundtrack so there is no music to offer clues to the audience. Also the action is filmed in a flat, detached way; the shallow focus close-ups and unconventional framing often make it unclear what the central focus of the scene is.
Vero has hit her head in the incident but there is no blood. She has an x-ray but leaves before filling in her contact details; someone at the hospital recognises her as the wife of a doctor. This is how we learn that she is in the medical profession; she’s a dentist.
This is, above all, a psychological study of a middle-aged woman teetering on the edge of a nervous breakdown. She can no longer function in her job and she remains distant from friends and family. She is cold and remote but we haven’t seen what she was like before the accident so cannot tell how much of this behaviour is normal.
She has awkward, and fairly joyless, extra marital sex but seems to be operating on auto-pilot, as if in a trance. The way the movie is shot emphasises her isolation; she is in the foreground when other people are speaking but never properly interacts with them. Sometimes we don’t even see who is talking – they are headless.
She eventually tells her husband that she thinks she has killed a child and a few days later a boy is found near the spot where the accident happened. The husband has the damage to the car repaired; Veronica changes her hair colour from blonde to black (shades of Hitchcock’s Marnie or Vertigo). What really took place is still unknown but it seems certain she will live with a sense of guilt.
This is, I think, the first Argentine movie I’ve seen and it sets the bar very high. The slowness of the action and the lack of resolution will frustrate many viewers but, in her third full length feature director, Lucrecia Martel, has meticulously created a complex scenario where banal details of ordinary lives take on a sinister character. As she says in an interview with the online film journal Reverse Shot, “If you show everything, you underestimate the audience”.
