For some time now, I have been wanting to see La mujer sin cabeza (The Headless Woman), directed by Lucrecia Martel. I had seen Martel's previous two films, La niña santa (The Holy Girl) and La ciénaga (The Swamp), and each had left me with a strange sense of unease. La ciénaga, in particular, made me feel disturbed, even sick. But I was willing to give Martel another shot with La mujer sin cabeza after reading favorable reviews in the Spanish press. La mujer sin cabeza was selected for Cannes in 2008, and was co-produced in part by the Almodóvar brothers (not that Martel needed their help, I might add). It is, in my view, the best of the three Martel films I've seen thus far. I found it challenging, enigmatic and, as usual, a masterpiece of sound. In addition, La mujer sin cabeza relates on many levels to my scholarly interests in memory and trauma.Martel was born in Argentina in 1966 and is part of the so-called "New Argentine Film." In the DVD extras, Martel refutes this categorization, stating that she does not even identify herself as a filmmaker, much less as a filmmaker of a particular generation. However, she does acknowledge the recent developments in Argentine film and attributes the surge in production - at least in part - to a kind of cultural gap created by the military dictatorship (1976-1983).
When it comes to Argentine film, I have to confess that I am most familiar with works about the dictatorship and its aftermath -- La historia oficial, Cautiva, Los rubios, Nietos: identidad y memoria, etc. Martel's La mujer sin cabeza does not deal in any specific way with the dictatorship, and yet there are clear reference points to this dark period of Argentine history throughout the film. I have chosen to write about La mujer here because it is all about memory and amnesia, on both a collective and an individual level.
As with Martel's other films, La mujer takes places near Salta, Argentina, the northwest corner of the country, where the director was born. The landscape is largely rural, and there is a significant emphasis on social class differences. And, as Martel comments in an interview, here, race is also a factor. Once again, we enter the world of the upper middle class and are treated to the sort of banal issues that permeate their everyday imaginations -- getting their cars washed, their hair dyed, their bodies massaged, and their yards landscaped.
The film's protagonist is a bleach-blonde dentist named Verónica, or Vero. Vero is married to Marcos, in what seems to be a relatively loveless, joyless relationship. Vero and Marcos's daughter is in Tucumán, studying law. Though Vero is often in the presence of family and friends, we get the sense she is quite alone, alienated from herself and others.
La mujer sin cabeza tells the story of Vero's mysterious car accident on the way home from a gathering with friends. When her cell phone rings, Vero, alone in her car, goes to answer it and hits, with force, an object in the road. In the opening scene, we see three dark-skinned (most likely, Indian -- Martel notes Bolivia's proximity to Argentina in the DVD extras) boys playing in an empty canal, and when Vero's car stops, two small handprints mark the window of the driver-side door. Looking in her rearview mirror, Vero notes a dead dog in the road, but we know, and know she knows, that she has collided with something far more grave. The handprints travel with Vero for some time, until, in a daze, she gets out of the car and a heavy, pelting rain begins to hit the windshield (rain, and water in general, course throughout the film)
The film's disorienting opening scenes are just a prelude for what is to come. Viewers are sent hurling into the same oneiric, drifting realm as Vero, as we accompany her from the scene of the accident to a hospital for X-rays, a hotel for a tryst with her husband's cousin Juan Manuel, and her own home. I often had the feeling that I myself had just been hit in the head with a blunt object and was trying to recover a coherent view of the world. The extent of Vero's amnesia was never entirely clear to me -- and I think Martel does this on purpose. It is difficult to discern how much Vero comprehends of what is going on around her, though it does seem that she is unable to recognize familiar faces, names and events in the immediate aftermath of the accident.
María Onetto, who plays Vero, gives a stunning performance. She moves through the world in a daze, as if in slow motion, while people buzz about her, entering her space and leaving her to what appears to be an impending breakdown: Vero has lost familiarity with those around her, but also herself. The way she dresses herself (or does not -- she stays in the same outfit as on the day of the accident for what seems at least a day), smooths her hair, sips a cup of coffee or engages in relations with her husband's cousin indicate a profound disconnect with the body and the self; perhaps, however, these are gestures Vero makes toward normalcy, as she represses the accident and attempts to pick up her life where she left off.
The film's title, which, as some have noted, evokes a horror story (i.e. "the headless horseman," etc.), can also be seen as the profound impact that loss of memory has on the self, on one's identity. Memory is the self, and when it is lost, the self becomes other. Martel demonstrates this in a powerful manner, often introducing Vero with the top of her head literally cut off. There are, in fact, many scenes, in which we struggle to see Vero as a "complete" figure on the other end of the lens. Frames often feel crowded, even "amputated," populated with head shots, as when we observe Vero and her niece's friend riding in the car, and her niece on a motorbike alongisde the passenger window.
While we might assume that Vero's amnesia is an effect of the accident and its traumatic outcome -- a coping strategy (a moral escape route?) as well as a physical repercussion -- as La mujer indicates, others in Vero's circle are quite adept at imposing amnesia upon her, in aiding her with the re-writing of her story (perhaps, it would be better to say with the erasure of her story). As the NYT reviewer, Stephen Holden, noted, it is the men in Vero's life who try to protect her from the truth: "the men in her life have apparently protected her by erasing any evidence of her whereabouts the day of the accident; the car has been repaired."
When Vero at last confesses to her husband that she believes she hit and killed a person, her husband drives her to the scene of the crime, insisting that what she hit was only a dog, and that, as he repeatedly puts it, "you were scared." Yet Marcos later takes Vero's car to the shop and has the damage pounded out, and a series of other "repairs" are also made, in an attempt to expunge the record of the past -- Vero's X-rays disappear from the hospital in which she was treated, and the hotel has no record of her stay. In the end of the film, we witness Vero dyeing her unnaturally-blonde hair to a dark brown, effectively adopting a new persona divorced from her previous life. For Holden, this change is indicative of Vero's "tacit complicity to forget what happened."
Holden sees La mujer sin cabeza as "a meditation on Argentina's historical memory," alluding primarily to the recent dictatorship. Martel herself, though focusing her discussion of the film largely on class issues, does not deny or dispute readings linking the work to Argentina's attempts to deal with its violent past. I am inclined to read the film at least partly about this period as well.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to miss the allusions -- missing bodies; crimes swept under the carpet; perpetrators sharing space with victims' families; even Vero's daughter, who studies law in Tucumán (significantly, Vero's car is repaired here, where some of the worst human rights abuses occurred during the dictatorship). Clearly, La mujer offers a critical take on the sort of stories (and histories) that prevail -- the official stories again -- and those that are swept under the rug. Yet La mujer goes beyond the dictatorship, taking on other sorts of amnesias as well -- such as the sort Vero and her family and friends perpetuate in their treatment of the racial other. Vero kills an Indian boy, and the ghosting of his murder can be read as a kind of induced racial and class oblivion, which allows Vero, Juan Manuel and Marcos --"European" Argentines of the bourgeoisie -- to thrive at the expense of others.
I made an immediate connection between this film and Muerte de un ciclista (Death of a Cyclist), which just came out on Criterion last year. However, when asked about this link, Martel states that she was unconcerned about any overlap because La mujer deals with the differences between classes, while Muerte de un ciclista tends to focus more on the infidelities within a marriage and tensions among members of the same social class. Nonetheless, both films take up the encounter between a cyclist and a car, and deal with hit-and-run accidents and marital infidelity. Martel notes that in the 1990s, Argentina saw an influx of SUVs, and an increase in accidents between large vehicles and bicycles. She sees this as an obvious entrance point to tackle glaring disparities between upper middle and lower classes.
Ultimately, the film offers no easy resolution. Like the fountain or well discovered under Vero's home at the end of the film, we get the sense that we have only scratched the surface of a dark history that still lies buried beneath an outwardly-stable foundation. A crime remains unspoken, but there are those who know the truth and continue to say nothing.
I would definitely watch this film again -- I think there is much that is probably easy to miss the first time around. If anyone has seen it and would like to comment, please feel free to do so!
U.S. Trailer (which does not do the film justice, though it does have some quite favorable review quotes):
Spanish trailer (unfortunately, no subtitles provided, sorry!):
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